The three parts of the Speaking test
The Speaking test lasts 11–14 minutes and is face to face with an examiner. It is recorded.
- Part 1 (4–5 minutes): short questions about familiar topics such as your work, your home, your hometown, food or how you spend weekends.
- Part 2 (3–4 minutes): you get a cue card, one minute to prepare and then speak for up to two minutes on the topic. The examiner may ask one or two short follow-up questions.
- Part 3 (4–5 minutes): a discussion of more abstract questions linked to the Part 2 topic. This is where higher bands are decided.
You are marked on Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation.
Fluency versus accuracy
Students often ask which matters more. The honest answer is both, but in different ways.
Fluency means speaking at length without long pauses or constant self-correction. It does not mean speaking fast. Many Dubai candidates speak quickly because that is the pace of work conversations, but rushing usually creates more errors and less clarity.
Accuracy means correct grammar and well-chosen words. Students who worry too much about accuracy often stop mid-sentence to fix small mistakes, which hurts fluency.
The balance to aim for: keep talking, use natural linking ("the main reason is...", "having said that..."), and let small slips go.
Pronunciation points for Dubai's communities
Pronunciation is marked on how easy you are to understand, not on sounding British or American. A clear accent from any background is fine. These are simply the points that speakers from Dubai's main communities commonly work on:
- Arabic speakers: separating /p/ and /b/ ("park" and "bark"), and /v/ and /f/; keeping short vowels distinct, as in "ship" and "sheep"; and avoiding an added vowel in clusters such as "spring" or "street".
- Tagalog and other Filipino language speakers: /f/ and /p/ ("fan" and "pan"), /v/ and /b/, and "th" sounds; also word stress in longer words.
- Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi speakers: /v/ and /w/ ("vest" and "west"), the "th" in "think" and "this", and avoiding an extra vowel before words starting with "s", like "school" or "station".
- Malayalam and Tamil speakers: /z/ and /j/, /v/ and /w/, and the stress patterns in words like "photograph" and "photography".
- Bengali and Sinhala speakers: /s/ and /sh/, /v/ and /b/, and sentence stress so that key words stand out.
Focus on two or three points at a time. Record yourself and compare your recording with a model speaker.
Practising when you have no partner
Shared flats, long shifts and different weekends make it hard to find a regular practice partner in Dubai. You can still practise properly alone:
- Use real timers. IELTS Learning has 186 Speaking prompts for all three parts. Part 2 cue cards use a real one-minute preparation timer and a two-minute speaking timer, so you learn how long two minutes actually is.
- Speak out loud, every time. Thinking the answer in your head is not practice.
- Read your transcript. The AI feedback on your transcript shows repeated words, short answers and grammar slips you would never notice while speaking.
- Answer Part 1 about your real life in Dubai. Questions about where you live, your commute, the weather or what you do on your day off come up often. Have something genuine and specific to say rather than a memorised script.
- Extend Part 3 answers. Give an opinion, a reason, an example and, if possible, a contrast. Four sentences, not one.
When to book a teacher
AI feedback is good for volume and for spotting patterns. A human examiner-style conversation is different, and many students only feel ready after doing a few.
Book a Teacher gives you a 1-to-1 online session with an IELTS teacher, about 20 minutes long, from $5. Use it for a full mock Speaking test, for pronunciation work on specific sounds, or for practising Part 3 discussions where you need someone to push back on your ideas. Sessions are booked separately from Full Access.
Getting ready for test day
On test day, the examiner wants to hear you speak, so give full answers. Do not memorise answers; examiners are trained to notice, and memorised speech can lower your score. If you do not understand a question in Part 3, you can ask the examiner to repeat or rephrase it.
Start with the free sample mock test, which includes a Speaking section, and build vocabulary daily with Daily Vocabulary. Full Access is $12 for 2 months. Register here to begin.