How the Speaking test works
The Speaking test lasts 11 to 14 minutes and takes place face to face with an examiner. It has three parts:
- Part 1 (4 to 5 minutes): questions about familiar topics such as your home, work, studies, hobbies or daily routine.
- Part 2 (3 to 4 minutes): you receive a cue card, have one minute to prepare and then speak for up to two minutes on the topic. The examiner may ask a short follow-up question.
- Part 3 (4 to 5 minutes): a discussion of more abstract questions linked to the Part 2 topic.
You are marked on four criteria: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation.
Fluency or accuracy: which matters more?
Both count equally, but students often sacrifice one for the other. Some speak quickly and confidently with frequent grammar slips; others stop every few words to correct themselves.
For most people, the answer is to keep talking. A small error in a long, well-linked answer costs less than a long silence. Use natural fillers such as "That's an interesting question" or "Let me think about that for a moment" sparingly, and extend your answers with reasons and examples. In Part 1, two or three sentences per answer is usually right. In Part 3, aim for four or five.
Pronunciation points for Sharjah's language communities
Pronunciation is not about sounding British or American. It is about being easy to understand, using stress and intonation naturally and producing individual sounds clearly. Here are points speakers of the main languages in Sharjah commonly work on.
Arabic speakers
- /p/ and /b/: "pen" and "Ben", "park" and "bark". Arabic has no /p/, so practise with minimal pairs.
- /v/ and /f/: "very" and "ferry", "van" and "fan".
- Consonant clusters: words like "street", "spring" or "split" sometimes gain an extra vowel at the start. Practise them slowly, then at normal speed.
- Short vowels: "ship" and "sheep", "full" and "fool".
Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi speakers
- /v/ and /w/: "vest" and "west", "vine" and "wine" are often merged.
- Word stress: stressing the wrong syllable, for example in "development" or "photograph", can make words hard to recognise even when every sound is correct.
- Extra vowels before words starting with "s", as in "school" or "station".
Filipino and Tagalog speakers
- /f/ and /p/, /v/ and /b/: "fast" and "past", "vote" and "boat".
- "th" sounds: "think" and "this" are often produced as /t/ and /d/.
- Fluency is often a strength. The work is usually on range of vocabulary and complex grammar in Part 3.
Bengali and Sylheti speakers
- /s/ and /sh/: "sip" and "ship", "seat" and "sheet".
- /z/ and /j/: "zest" and "jest", or the middle sounds of "lazy" and "ledger".
Practising when you have no speaking partner
Plenty of students in Sharjah practise English all day at work but have nobody to rehearse IELTS answers with. You can still practise properly alone:
- Speak aloud every time. Thinking an answer in your head is not Speaking practice.
- Use real timers. Our 186 Speaking prompts include Part 2 cue cards with a genuine one-minute preparation timer and two-minute speaking timer, so you learn how long two minutes really feels.
- Read your transcript. After each answer, the platform gives AI feedback on a transcript of what you said. Look for repeated words, very short answers and phrases you overuse.
- Use dead time. Sitting in traffic on the road to Dubai? If you are driving alone, answer a Part 1 question out loud. It feels strange at first, and then it becomes useful.
Bringing Sharjah into your answers
Part 1 and Part 2 often ask about your home, your neighbourhood, a place you like to visit or something you do at the weekend. Have real details ready. You might talk about an evening walk along Al Majaz Waterfront, the museums in the Heart of Sharjah, a favourite restaurant in Al Nahda, the book fair, or a beach trip to the east coast. Real experiences are easier to describe fluently than invented ones, and they naturally bring in more varied vocabulary.
When to book a teacher session
AI feedback is excellent for regular practice, but a person can judge things like confidence, natural intonation and how well you handle a surprising Part 3 question. A 1-to-1 online session of about 20 minutes, from $5, works well as a full Speaking rehearsal one or two weeks before your test. You get live questions, a realistic sense of the examiner's pace and specific advice on what to fix.
Sign up free to try the Speaking section in the free sample mock test, and add five words a day to your vocabulary with Daily Vocabulary.