IELTS Speaking Tips - Part 1
How To Improve Your IELTS Speaking Score: Part 1
This blog includes a few ideas to get a higher IELTS score in the speaking test. The IELTS speaking test has three main sections. There is one idea below for each of the three main sections.
A Brief Summary of the Test
You will do your IELTS speaking test in a room with a native English speaker or examiner. The examiner asks you questions and listens carefully to your English answers. At the end of the test after you leave the room, the examiner will give you a score from 1 to 9. The examiner also makes a recording of your speaking so that another examiner can check your speaking and check that you have the right score.
To get a good score you need to do these things:
Answer the questions that you hear
Use correct English vocabulary and grammar
Use a large number of different words and phrases
Organise your ideas in clear way
Part 1: Introduction
Most of the questions in part 1 are not very difficult. The examiner always asks about basic information about you. because you know what a lot of the questions will be, you can prepare this part of the test and practise saying answers to some of these standard questions.
First question: What’s your name?
Answer: The big mistake here is to speak quickly. You know your own name. It’s easy because it’s from your language so it’s easy to say it quickly and move on. But this is a mistake. The examiner is English and they probably don’t know your language. When you say your name you need to say it really slowly and clearly. Also, you should be ready to spell the letters of your first name and your family name. Practise saying the spelling of your name many times so that you can do this easily and clearly. Be careful if your name contains the letters “i”, “e”, “g” or “j”.
Second Question: Where are you from?
Answer: You should say two sentences about your town or city. Again, be careful to say names slowly and clearly because the examiner maybe doesn’t know place names in your country. Here is an example:
I’m from Bristol. It’s the largest city in the South-West of England and it’s about a hundred kilometres from London.
Third Question: What’s it (your city) like?
Answer: It’s a very old city but most of the buildings now are quite new. It rains a lot all the year round and the people are quite friendly.
Fourth question: What’s your job?
They sometimes ask in a different way: “Are you in full-time education or employment?”
Here are some different good answers to this question:
“I work as a sales assistant in a supermarket. It’s a part-time job to make some extra money.”
“I’ve been working as an electrician for the last ten years.”
“I’m between jobs at the moment. I was a construction worker two years ago but the company closed down.”
“At the moment, I’m studying English full-time. Before that, I worked in a bank.”
“I recently qualified as an accountant. Now I’m looking for a job in an international company.”
Fifth question: What do you want to do in the future?
It’s a good idea to say something definite here. It doesn’t need to be true. Here are some typical good answers.
“I’m planning to study engineering at a university. After that I’ll probably go back to South Korea.”
“I’d like to get a job in an international company. I really want to work in other countries.”
“I hope I’ll be able to get a visa to stay in the UK. I don’t really want to go back to North Korea.”
“I’m getting married in two months’ time. I can’t really think about things further in the future at the moment.”
In Part 1 of the speaking test the examiner also chooses a “friendly” topic from a list of topics and asks two or three questions about the same topic. There is a list below of the kinds of things included in the list of topics. You should be ready to talk about all of these topics. If one of them is a bad topic for, you should study English words about the topic and practise speaking about it in English.
Here are some of the topics:
sports, family, neighbours, hobbies, television, music, fashion, shopping, cinema, celebrities, travel, flowers in your home, magazines and newspapers, food, dancing, going out, bicycles
Example: Television:
- How often do you watch television?
- How popular is television in your country?
- Do you watch television more or less than you did in the past?
- Do you think watching television is a good activity for young children?
Your answers don’t need to be positive. If you say that you don’t like television and you think it is bad for children you can still get a good score.
Example answers:
- I almost never watch television nowadays. It’s not something that I have enough time for.
- In Switzerland, television is especially popular with the older generations. Young people these days prefer using their phones to look at the Internet.
- When I was a small child I really loved watching cartoons. But now I don’t even have a television set in my home.
- I think it’s okay for children to watch one programme and then stop. But watching television all day is not good for them.