The IELTS Speaking Test

The speaking is three parts, moving from personal questions to more of general interest questions. Part one’s questions are mainly personal, asking about your preferences, likes, and dislikes.

Part two is a two-minute presentation. The examiner hands you a topic to talk about non-stop for two minutes after one minute preparation time.

You need to make good use of the preparation time and discuss all the points of the prompt. Never miss a point and never talk shorter than two minutes.

Remember that you need to act as if it is a presentation, meaning that you need an introduction and a conclusion if you could manage it while pitching part 2.

Usually, there is a follow-up question which the examiner may ask about your part 2 answer.

Part three usually is about general topics like education, global warming, and even the economy. Here, you are expected to have some ideas to present about different topics, so you need to watch much of the news while preparing for your test to have better ideas of the world around you.

There are four main criteria on which you get evaluated, explained as the following:

• Fluency and coherence

You don’t need to be too fast to score high here. But you need to be speaking at the natural level of fluency without language hesitation. Content-related hesitation is tolerated, which is that hesitation of what ideas to say not the hesitation because of the language level.

Coherence refers to whether you answer the exact question you get asked or you get off-topic because you lack the language to get the question.

Self-correction is encouraged to a level, but if you will be slowing down for the sake of correcting every single mistake, then don’t correct and speak fluently.

• Lexical Resource

It refers to the level of vocabulary you use and whether or not you repeat yourself or you have a wide range of synonyms and flexibility to paraphrase accurately.

You can use proper idioms and colloquial expressions freely as long as they are formal language. Using informal language and slang can lead to losing a number of marks in this category.

• Grammatical Range and Accuracy

Just like writing, you need to make error-free sentences and use much of the complex structure rather than speaking in simple sentences most of the time. Persistent mistakes and speaking in simple structures will never let you go beyond band 6.5 no matter how fluent you speak.

• Pronunciation

The accent is not a synonym for pronunciation. It refers to speaking clearly without any misunderstanding due to the mother-tongues effect/interference. Also, using the correct intonation while speaking is advised here. You could practice this so easily by listening to audiobooks and repeating after the speakers.

Remember, practice makes perfect.