How the Speaking test works
Speaking lasts 11 to 14 minutes, face to face with an examiner, and is recorded.
- Part 1 (4 to 5 minutes): familiar questions about your home, studies, work, hobbies and daily life.
- Part 2 (3 to 4 minutes): a cue card with a topic. You get one minute to prepare, then speak for up to two minutes. The examiner may ask one or two short follow-up questions.
- Part 3 (4 to 5 minutes): a discussion of more abstract ideas linked to the Part 2 topic.
You are marked on Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation.
Fluency or accuracy: which matters more?
Both count equally, but students from engineering backgrounds often overcorrect. They pause to choose the perfect word, restart sentences and give one-line answers to stay safe. That lowers Fluency and Coherence and gives the examiner too little language to reward.
A better rule: answer, explain, add an example. "I'm from Trichy. It's a fairly old city on the Kaveri, so a lot of daily life still revolves around the temples and the river, especially in Srirangam where my grandparents live." Two or three natural sentences in Part 1, a full two minutes in Part 2, and reasons with examples in Part 3.
Pronunciation points for Tamil speakers
Clear pronunciation is about being easy to understand, not about sounding British or American. Your Indian accent is perfectly acceptable. These are the points many Tamil speakers find worth working on:
- v and w. Tamil has one sound covering both, so "wine" and "vine" can merge. Round your lips for w, touch the lower lip to the teeth for v.
- th sounds. "Think" and "this" often become "tink" and "dis". Put the tongue lightly between the teeth.
- Initial s-clusters. Some speakers add a short vowel before words like "school", "station" or "speak". Practise starting directly on the s.
- Word stress. English changes stress between related words: PHOtograph, phoTOgraphy, photoGRAPHic. Wrong stress affects understanding more than individual sounds do.
- Sentence intonation. A fairly level tone across a whole answer can sound flat to an examiner. Let your voice rise and fall to show what is important.
- Final consonants. Words like "asked" and "months" lose their endings when spoken quickly. Slow down slightly on the ends of words.
Practising with no partner
Plenty of Trichy students, especially those in hostels where everyone speaks Tamil after classes, or working people with no IELTS friends nearby, have nobody to practise with. That is fine.
- Use the Speaking prompts on IELTS Learning. There are 186 prompts across Parts 1, 2 and 3.
- Trust the cue-card timer. Part 2 gives you a real one-minute preparation countdown and a two-minute speaking limit, so you learn exactly how long two minutes feels. Most students stop after 70 or 80 seconds at first.
- Read the AI feedback on your transcript. It shows repeated words, incomplete sentences, limited vocabulary and grammar patterns. Seeing your speech written down is often a shock, and a useful one.
- Narrate your day in English for five minutes: the drive past the Rockfort, a lab session, what you bought at the market. It builds the habit of speaking without translating.
Why a live teacher session helps
Speaking to software is good practice, but the real test is a conversation with a person. Book a Teacher gives you a 1-to-1 online session of about 20 minutes with an IELTS teacher, from ₹299. Ask them to run a full mock interview, then give you feedback on all four criteria and two or three pronunciation points to fix. One session every week or two in the month before your test is enough for most students. Between sessions, practise the specific points the teacher gave you, so each new session starts from a higher level rather than repeating the same advice.
Speaking topics that suit Trichy life
Cue cards ask about places, people, objects and experiences. Students from here have natural material: a festival such as Pongal or the Vaikunta Ekadasi crowds at Srirangam, a trip to the Kallanai dam, a project at college, a family member who works at BHEL, a favourite place to eat. Prepare a few flexible stories rather than memorised answers. Examiners recognise scripts, and memorised answers usually score lower.
Register free to try Speaking prompts, and pick up new expressions each morning with Daily Vocabulary.