IELTS Speaking: eleven minutes, recorded

Three parts, eleven to fourteen minutes, one examiner, and the whole thing recorded. It is the section candidates dread and the one where preparation pays back fastest, because most of what holds people back is a handful of habits rather than their English.

The one-minute version: extend every answer with a reason or an example — that one habit moves more bands than any vocabulary list. Fluency is not speed. Accent is not marked. And a memorised answer is obvious within a sentence.

What is being marked

Fluency and coherence — keeping going at a steady pace, and organising what you say so it follows. Long hesitations while you hunt for a word cost more than speaking slowly and evenly.
Lexical resource — the range and precision to talk about an unfamiliar topic, including paraphrasing your way round a word you do not have.
Grammatical range and accuracy — complex structures attempted as well as accurate ones. A test of only short correct sentences cannot show range.
Pronunciation — intelligibility, word and sentence stress, and intonation. Your accent is not penalised. Being hard to follow is, and that is usually about stress and rhythm rather than individual sounds.

Part 1 (4–5 minutes): familiar topics

After an identity check, straightforward questions about your life — where you live, work or study, free time, food, transport. The examiner is working from a script and will move briskly.

The target length is two or three sentences: a direct answer, then a reason or an example. One-word answers give the examiner nothing to mark, and the questions come fast enough that a run of them wastes a third of your fluency evidence. The opposite error is treating Part 1 as a speech — a ninety-second answer here will be cut off, because there is a list to get through.

Part 2 (3–4 minutes): the long turn

You get a card with a topic and some prompts, paper and a pencil, one minute to prepare, then one to two minutes to talk. The examiner will stop you at two and may ask a short rounding-off question.

The prompts are a suggested structure, not a requirement. You will not be penalised for covering them in a different order, or for going beyond them — they exist to stop you running dry. In practice they are a decent plan, so use them unless you have a better one.
Spend the minute on content, not wording. Note specifics: names, places, numbers, a moment. Trying to write sentences means reading aloud badly for two minutes.
Tell it in time order and finish somewhere. A long turn that ends with "and that's why it mattered to me" sounds organised, which is literally a criterion.
If you dry up early, add the two turns that always exist: why it mattered to you, and whether you would do it again or recommend it. That is another thirty seconds and it is still on topic.

Part 3 (4–5 minutes): the discussion

Abstract questions connected to Part 2's theme — societies rather than you, trends rather than last Tuesday. This is where the higher bands are decided, because the language needed to speculate, compare and qualify is more demanding.

Three legitimate tactics for a question you have no ready answer to, all of which are normal educated speech rather than tricks:

Narrow it. "That depends a lot on the country — in somewhere like..." turns an unanswerable generality into a case you can actually discuss.
Compare two cases. Then and now, young and old, cities and small towns. Comparison generates structure, and structure is cohesion.
Answer the "it depends on X" way — then say what X is. Hedging (tend to, by and large, arguably) is a feature of good academic speech, not evasion.

And you are allowed to ask for a question to be repeated, or to check you have understood it. Doing that once costs nothing; answering the wrong question for a minute costs a lot.

Fluency, specifically

Fluency is not talking fast. It is a steady, followable flow with hesitation in the normal places — between ideas — rather than mid-phrase while you search for a noun. Two things help more than anything else:

Paraphrase instead of stalling. If the word will not come, go round it: "the thing you use to... the handle part". That is lexical resource being demonstrated, not a failure. Silence is the only answer that scores nothing.
Stop self-correcting small errors. Going back to fix an article or a tense breaks the flow, and the repair is worth less than the fluency it costs.

Vocabulary by topic — useful, with a limit

Building vocabulary around the recurring themes (work, education, technology, environment, city life, health) is real preparation: it is what lets you be specific under pressure.

Memorised chunks are a different thing and they do not survive contact with the examiner. A rehearsed phrase sits oddly in spontaneous speech, and Part 3 will shift the question in a way the phrase cannot follow. The same goes for lists of "useful IELTS expressions": a few genuine discourse markers are plenty, and reciting them is conspicuous. Learn words and collocations, not sentences.

What to do with "band 8 sample answers"

This site's old speaking section was full of them, and they are useful — read the right way. Look at how the answer is built: where it gives a reason, how it handles a question it does not love, how it moves from a specific story to a general point, how much hedging a high-band answer actually contains.

Do not memorise them. An answer delivered from memory is detectable within a sentence — the register shifts, the pace changes, the content stops matching the exact question — and the examiner's response is to probe, which leaves you worse off than an honest band-6 answer would have.

How to practise alone

You do not need a partner, and recording yourself is more useful than talking to one:

Answer a Part 2 card cold, with a real one-minute preparation and a phone recording. No second attempt.
Transcribe sixty seconds of it, word for word. This is the step people skip and it is the whole exercise.
Count four things in that transcript: filler sounds, self-corrections, sentences that are only simple, and the longest silence. Those four numbers are your feedback, and they move visibly over a few weeks.
Read aloud for stress, not sounds. Two minutes of any text, deliberately stressing the content words. It does more for intelligibility than drilling individual phonemes.

Then come back to a fresh card. The practice-test page covers how to fit this into a week alongside the other three skills.

The rest of this section

Each skill has its own page, and the practice-test page covers how to use them together. The section overview has the band-score arithmetic and the Academic/General Training split.