How the Speaking test works
Speaking lasts 11 to 14 minutes, face to face with an examiner, in three parts:
- Part 1 (4–5 minutes): familiar questions about your home, studies, work, hobbies and daily life. Short, natural answers of two or three sentences.
- Part 2 (3–4 minutes): a cue card with a topic and prompts. You get one minute to prepare and then speak for up to two minutes without interruption.
- Part 3 (4–5 minutes): a discussion of wider, more abstract questions linked to the Part 2 topic. This is where higher bands are decided.
You are marked on four criteria: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation.
Fluency vs accuracy
Many students from strict exam backgrounds try to speak perfectly and end up speaking slowly, stopping to correct every sentence. Examiners prefer a steady, connected flow with a few small errors to careful sentences full of long pauses. On the other hand, speaking fast is not fluency either: rushing makes pronunciation unclear.
Aim for a comfortable pace, link your ideas ("the main reason is...", "on the other hand..."), and if you make a mistake, correct it once quickly and carry on.
Watch the filler habits common in Indian English: repeating "actually", "basically" and "like", or ending sentences with "na?" or "no?". One now and then is fine; every sentence is not.
Pronunciation tips for Hindi, Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi speakers
Patna is a city of many home languages, and each brings its own strengths and habits. Pronunciation in IELTS is about being easy to understand, not about sounding British or American. These are the points students from Bihar most often work on:
- "s" and "sh". Some speakers swap these, so "she sells" or "sure" can become unclear. Practise pairs: sip/ship, same/shame, sort/short.
- "z" and "j". "Zero", "easy" and "busy" use a buzzing "z", not "j". Try: zoo/Jew, zip/jip.
- "v" and "w". Both often become one sound. "V" uses top teeth on the lower lip (very, video); "w" uses rounded lips (west, window).
- "f" and "ph". In English "ph" in "phone" and "photo" is a clean "f" sound, with lips and teeth, not a puff of air.
- Consonant clusters. Some speakers add a vowel before or inside clusters: "school" as "ischool", "station" as "istation", or "film" as "filam". Say them as one smooth sound.
- Word stress. English stresses one syllable strongly: PHO-to-graph, pho-TO-gra-pher, pho-to-GRA-phic. Getting stress right helps examiners understand you more than any single sound.
- "th". Put your tongue lightly between your teeth for "think" and "this" rather than replacing them with "t" or "d".
- Intonation. Let your voice fall at the end of statements and use rises for real questions. A flat tone can make good answers sound uncertain.
Choose two of these at a time. Trying to fix everything at once makes you stiff.
Practising IELTS Speaking when you have no partner
Many students in Patna live in lodges or with families where nobody else is preparing for IELTS. That is fine: most Speaking practice can be done alone.
- Record yourself on your phone. Listen back once for fluency, once for pronunciation.
- Talk through your day in English on an evening walk along the Ganga or while waiting for an auto. It feels strange for a week, then it becomes easy.
- Use the Part 2 cue-card timer. On IELTS Learning you get a real 1-minute preparation timer and a 2-minute speaking timer, so you learn what two minutes actually feels like.
- Read your transcript. After each answer, the AI feedback shows what you said as text, with comments on fluency, vocabulary and grammar. Seeing "actually" written six times is more convincing than any teacher's warning.
Preparing for Part 2 in one minute
Write four or five keywords, not sentences. Plan a simple path: what it is, when and where, what happened, how you felt and why it matters. Then speak, and keep going until the timer stops you.
Answering Part 3
Give a direct answer, a reason, an example and, if possible, a contrast. For example, if asked whether young people in cities read less than before, you might mention how phones changed reading habits, then add that competitive-exam culture in cities like Patna still keeps many young people reading every day.
When to book a teacher
You have 186 prompts across all three parts for daily practice. A 1-to-1 online session with an IELTS teacher (about 20 minutes, from ₹299) is the closest thing to the real test: a live examiner-style conversation with feedback on what to change. Many students book one early to find their main issues and another in the final week before the test.
Register free and try the Speaking section of the sample mock.