IELTS Speaking format: parts, timing and what the examiner is scoring

Three parts, one examiner, 11 to 14 minutes. Part 1 is a short interview about familiar subjects. Part 2 is a two-minute talk from a cue card. Part 3 is a discussion that grows out of the Part 2 topic. The whole thing is recorded, and the examiner scores you at the end on four criteria, each worth a quarter of your band.

Two things surprise candidates. First, you are scored on the whole interview, not on individual answers — one weak reply does not sink you. Second, the examiner reads questions from a script and cannot help you, rephrase freely or react to your ideas. Their neutral face is procedure, not judgement.

After checking your identity, the examiner asks about two or three familiar topic frames: where you live, your work or studies, and then a couple of everyday subjects like sleep, plants, weekends or photographs. Expect three or four questions per frame, moving from simple facts (Do you like your hometown?) toward preferences and small opinions (Would you rather live somewhere quieter?).

The right length is two to four sentences: a direct answer, a reason or example, and a stop. Candidates lose marks here by either giving one-word replies or launching into a speech. Part 1 topics are published on our Part 1 index, grouped by category, with the exact questions reported in each exam period.

You receive a cue card — Describe a … — with three or four bullet points, plus a pencil and paper. You have one minute to prepare and then speak for one to two minutes without interruption. The examiner stops you at two minutes and may ask one short rounding-off question.

Use the preparation minute to choose one concrete story and write four or five anchor words, not sentences. Cover every bullet, then finish with how you felt or why it mattered. Because cue cards rotate, we keep one page per recurring card in the Part 2 index: every wording reported period by period, a band 7.5 sample answer and the Part 3 questions that followed it.

Part 3 zooms out from your cue card to society. If Part 2 was about a gift you gave, Part 3 asks why people give gifts, whether that has changed, and what it might look like in the future. The examiner can now follow up on your answers and push you to explain, compare and speculate.

The habit that earns marks is answering the question in the first sentence and then developing it: a reason, an example, a contrast. Avoid answering only from personal experience — Part 3 wants a general view first, then your example. Every reported Part 3 question is listed on our Part 3 page, grouped under the cue card it followed.

Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation are each scored from 0 to 9. Your overall band is their average, rounded to the nearest half band. That arithmetic matters: a 7, 7, 6, 6 gives 6.5, so a single strong criterion cannot carry you.

Fluency rewards speaking at length without long pauses and connecting ideas naturally. Lexical Resource rewards precise, topic-appropriate words and some less common phrasing, used correctly. Grammar rewards a mix of simple and complex structures with few errors. Pronunciation rewards clear individual sounds plus the features that make speech easy to follow: word stress, sentence stress, intonation and chunking.

IELTS refreshes the Speaking question pool three times a year: January-April, May-August and September-December. Roughly a third of the topics are replaced each time and the rest carry over, often with slightly different wording. This is why test-takers around the world report the same cue cards in the same four-month window, and why a dated question list is worth more than a generic topic list.

Our exam-period pages collect everything reported for a given four-month window — Part 1 topics, Part 2 cue cards and their Part 3 questions — and each topic page shows how the question changed across earlier periods.

Treating Part 1 like Part 2 and giving a two-minute answer to Do you like cooking? Writing full sentences in the preparation minute and then reading them. Answering the topic instead of the question — describing a city when the card asked for a city you would like to visit. Filling Part 3 with essay connectors (Furthermore, in conclusion) that nobody uses in speech. Stopping to apologise after a grammar slip instead of carrying on.

All of these come from not knowing the format well enough to relax inside it. Fix them by practising each part as its own skill with its own timing.

Once a week, record one full 14-minute mock in one take: Part 1, cue card with a real one-minute prep, Part 3. Listen back for the two problems that repeat most and spend the rest of the week on those, one part at a time. For Part 1, drill three-sentence answers to reported topics. For Part 2, practise the one-minute prep more than the talk itself. For Part 3, practise first-sentence answers to reported questions. Use questions from the current exam period so the surprise on test day is the examiner, not the topic.