IELTS Speaking, Marking and the IELTS Band Scores

In IELTS Speaking, performance is assessed on the following criteria specific to speaking:

Fluency and Coherence:

Do you express ideas and opinions clearly and coherently, without long hesitations?

Lexical Resources:

Do you use a wide range of vocabulary?

Grammatical Range and Accuracy:

Do you use a wide range of structures and make only a few minor mistakes?

Pronunciation:

Are you easy to understand?

Do you use English pronunciation features naturally?

Four band descriptors and a sliding scale

The overall result of each criteria is translated into a score on the IELTS nine-band score. 

What can you do to improve your performance in the Speaking test?

Be relaxed and try to be friendly.

Remember the examiner is trying to find out what you know, not what you don’t know.

You can ask the examiner to repeat the question if you don’t understand the question the first time.

You can say: Sorry, could you repeat that, or I didn’t understand what you said, could you say it again?

Get confident and record yourself and practice speaking on a variety of topics for 1 – 2 minutes.

This will help you gain confidence and practice your time management. You can also assess you own speaking fluency and pronunciation.

Be wise in your choice of vocabulary 

For example, don’t use unfamiliar, long words if you are not sure of their meaning. 

If you cannot remember the exact word you want, paraphrase and try to express your idea using similar words.

It is much easy to impress the examiner with an attempt to paraphrase rather than use a word incorrectly.

Practice making notes, spider-grams, and mind maps which will help you to talk on various topics in one minute.

The secret to a good speaking attempt is practice, understanding of the task and confidence. Many people find it difficult to answer questions unless they have practiced this skill, so practice!

Try to develop your answers instead of answering in just one word.

Record yourself and speak loudly and clearly into a recorder then develop your answers into a sentence or a number of connected sentences. 

Avoid using slang and abbreviations.

Using slang and abbreviations just doesn’t work in the speaking test. Imagine you are in a job interview. Would you take shortcuts or speak to the interviewer like you would to a friend?

Please do not tell the examiner what grade you require or ask how well you have done. This will only cause embarrassment and the examiner won’t tell you.

You might want to ask the examiner about your potential grade, but the examiner is a professional and is not allowed to discuss such matters. 

Do not use memorised chunks of language. Examiners are trained to recognise this. Furthermore, what you have memorised may not be relevant to the topic being discussed.

If you learn a phrase or a chunk of language, don’t try to fit this into your test. Language learnt like this is unnatural and it will appear unnatural too.

Avoid the common mistakes I have noticed recently –

Here are some quick and easy general speaking errors to avoid in the test: 

Not Speaking enough.

Giving short answers. 

Not developing your answers.

Giving prepared answers.

Not being able to answer.

Repeating the examiners question as your topic sentence.

Giving any of the above is likely to annoy the examiner.

The only acceptable mistake is ‘not being able to answer’ a question.

In cases such as these the examiner will always try and help you because they want to see what langauge you can display.

In the other cases, an annoyed examiner is less likely to help you produce a good speaking response and so your score might suffer.

Remember these tips and good luck 🙂 

Jonathan