Your accent is not what lowers the score
Speaking tests measure how easily a listener understands you, not how native you sound. A clear Vietnamese accent is compatible with the top bands. Missing word endings are not.
Word endings: where almost all the marks go
A Vietnamese syllable ends in a vowel or in one of a small set of consonants, and that consonant is not released — the mouth closes on it. Vietnamese has no consonant clusters at the end of a syllable at all.
English does the opposite. It ends words on almost any consonant, often two or three together, and it releases them audibly. So English endings tend to disappear:
- like → lie, cat → ca
- asked → ask or at
- friends → frien
- worked → work
This matters more in English than it would in Vietnamese, because English stores grammar at the ends of words. Lose the ending and the grammar goes with it, so the examiner hears a grammar mistake as well as a pronunciation one.
| What you meant | What it becomes | What was lost |
|---|---|---|
| She works here | She work here | third-person -s |
| I walked home | I walk home | past tense -ed |
| Two books | Two book | plural -s |
| He's tired | He tired | the verb is |
The final s, specifically
Final -s deserves its own practice. It carries plurals, third-person verbs, possessives and contractions, so it appears constantly — and it is one of the endings Vietnamese speakers most often leave off.
- Read a paragraph aloud and exaggerate every final s. It will feel like too much. It is not.
- Watch the ones that stack: asks, tests, lists, costs — say the whole cluster slowly rather than dropping part of it.
- Friends, months, clothes are hard for everyone. Slow down; do not simplify.
The sound contrasts worth fixing
| Sound | Why it's hard | What a listener may hear |
|---|---|---|
| /θ/ and /ð/ (th) | Not in Vietnamese; become /t/ or /d/. | think → tink, they → day |
| /z/ | Not in Vietnamese; becomes /s/. | zoo → soo, is → iss |
| /ʃ/ and /dʒ/ | Not present; approximated with /s/ or /z/. | she → see, job → zob |
| final /l/ | Vietnamese has no syllable-final /l/. | feel → few, ball → bao |
| /i:/ vs /ɪ/ | The contrast is unfamiliar. | sheep / ship, beat / bit |
Not on the list: your intonation or the general sound of your accent. Those identify you as Vietnamese and do not stop anyone understanding you.
Stress, not tone
Vietnamese carries meaning in tone on each syllable. English does not use tone that way. Instead it leans on one syllable per word and reduces the others, and it uses pitch across the whole sentence rather than on single syllables.
- RE-cord (noun) · re-CORD (verb) — same spelling, different stress, different word.
- Content words are stressed. A, the, of, to, is are said fast and quietly.
- In English a question rises across the end of the sentence, not on one syllable.
Because syllables in Vietnamese carry their own tone, English speech can come out sounding evenly weighted. Leaning harder on the stressed syllable makes you noticeably easier to follow.
How to practise
- Record yourself. While speaking you hear what you intended, not what you produced.
- Spend the first two weeks on word endings alone. Read aloud and finish every final consonant, especially -s and -ed. This single habit moves two scores.
- Then take one contrast from the table for a week — th or final /l/ first. Practise in sentences, not single words.
- Check, do not guess. Get an external read on which sounds a listener actually missed.
Aflo scores your speech sound by sound and shows you which sounds were hardest to catch.
For the test, and for real life
For the exam: finish your words. Everything else on this page is secondary to that.
Outside the exam you may want to sound more American or more British, for work or for yourself. That is a reasonable goal and a separate one from scoring well. Clarity is what the test pays for; the accent can stay.
Frequently asked questions
Will my Vietnamese accent lower my speaking score?
No. These tests score intelligibility rather than native-likeness, and Aflo's pronunciation scoring has a floor so that differences which are only accent stop affecting the score. What lowers a score is missing word endings.
What should I fix first?
Word endings, and specifically the final -s and -ed. Vietnamese syllables have no final consonant clusters and do not release final consonants, so English endings tend to disappear. Because English keeps grammar at the ends of words, that habit is heard as a grammar mistake as well, so it lowers two scores at once.
Do my tones affect my English?
Not directly — English does not use tone to distinguish words. What does transfer is even weighting: because each Vietnamese syllable carries its own tone, English can come out with every syllable given equal weight. English leans hard on one syllable per word, so learning word stress makes you much easier to follow.
How do I know which sounds to work on?
Record yourself and get an external check; you cannot judge your own pronunciation while producing it. Aflo compares your speech with the expected pronunciation one sound at a time and reports the sounds a listener was most likely to miss.