Speaking 2 — a second full interview

The whole test again — three parts, about fourteen minutes — with a different cue card and a Part 3 that goes somewhere else entirely. Do it after the first interview, not instead of it: the value of a second run is that the format is no longer a surprise, so what is left is your English.

Part 1 takes three ordinary topics — your hometown, food, how you get around — and hides two grammar tests in them. One question asks what you would cook or order if someone were coming to eat with you, which needs a conditional; another asks whether your tastes have changed since you were a child, which needs the past set against the present. Neither is signalled, and the examiner will not tell you if you answered a hypothetical question in the present simple. That is exactly what happens on the day.

Part 2 gives you one minute to prepare and then up to two to talk, alone, uninterrupted: describe a skill you learned that took a long time to get right — what it is, how you learned it, what the hardest part was, and why you kept going. Nobody will help you, stop you, or prompt you when you dry up. If your talk lasts forty seconds, that is the result, and it will appear in the report.

Part 3 turns the same theme outward and abstract: why adults find learning harder than children, what a teacher gives that practice alone cannot, what changes when learning comes from a video rather than a person, what is lost when a common skill becomes rare, and what a city could actually do about it. Here — and only here — the examiner may ask one follow-up. It is never a hint that something was wrong.

Then the report: an estimate on the nine-band scale, honestly labelled an estimate rather than a band, and the four criteria one at a time with your own words quoted back — including whether the conditional in Part 1 and the hedging in Part 3 actually appeared.

Two things it does not do well, said plainly. A very short Part 1 answer is sometimes met with "please develop your answer", which a real examiner would never do — treat that as a signal your answer was too short, not as a prompt you would get on the day. And a word of praise occasionally slips out after the long turn. The real test is silent throughout.

Speak, don't type, if you can. The microphone is there. Typed answers make three of the four criteria work and the fourth impossible — the report will say so rather than invent a verdict on your pronunciation.

Every question here is written by Zestly. No IELTS material is reproduced.

• Sit the full three-part interview a second time, with the format familiar and only the English left to test
• Handle a conditional and a past-versus-present comparison in Part 1 without being told that is what the question wants
• Hold the floor for two minutes on a cue card with no prompting, no interruption and no rescue
• Use the four points of a cue card as a shape rather than as four questions to answer in turn
• Move from personal answers in Part 1 to general ones in Part 3 — the single commonest place marks are lost
• Hedge a speculative claim (it tends to, I would imagine, it may simply be that) instead of asserting it flatly
• Put a case that is not your own — what someone else might say — in different language from your own view
• Read a four-criteria report that quotes what you actually said, and know what to practise next

That is the end of Part 1. Now Part 2. I am going to give you a topic, and I would like you to talk about it for one to two minutes. Before you talk you have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make notes if you wish. Here is your topic. Describe a skill you learned that took a long time to get right. You should say: what the skill is and when you started learning it; how you learned it; what the hardest part was; and explain why you kept going. You have one minute. Tell me when you are ready.