IELTS Speaking Practice with an examiner that listens back

How IELTS speaking practice works

You record a spoken answer to a real IELTS question. The AI transcribes it, then scores it against the four official Speaking criteria and shows you your own words with the fluency breaks, grammar slips and weak vocabulary highlighted. Because it can replay your audio infinitely, the feedback is more consistent than a single 11-minute human interview.

Scored on the four speaking criteria

Speaking is marked equally on Fluency & Coherence (pace, pausing, linking), Lexical Resource (range and precision of vocabulary), Grammatical Range & Accuracy, and Pronunciation. The practice tool gives a band for each so you know whether to work on speaking for longer, varying your structures, or sound-level clarity.

Parts 1, 2 and 3

Part 1 is short personal questions; Part 2 is a 1 to 2 minute long turn from a cue card; Part 3 is an abstract discussion. Each part rewards different things (Part 2 needs sustained fluency, Part 3 needs developed and justified opinions), and the tool gives part-specific feedback rather than one generic score.

What the pronunciation score is based on

Your recording is transcribed, and the Pronunciation band is judged from that transcript: word stress, phrasing, and the patterns a first language commonly leaves in word choice and rhythm. It is not a sound-by-sound acoustic analysis, so it will not tell you that one vowel was off. What it does give you is the band, the reason behind it, and the wording that held it there.

How long is the IELTS Speaking test, and what happens in each part?

Eleven to fourteen minutes, three parts, one examiner, and it is a live interview rather than something you type. Your test may be face to face in the room or over a video link from another city. The structure, the timings and the band descriptors are identical either way, so the delivery mode does not change what you should practise. What does change between the parts is the job you are being asked to do, and most candidates prepare as though all three were the same conversation.

Timings as published by IELTS for the Academic and General Training speaking test, which is the same test for both papers. Part 2 is the only part where you speak uninterrupted, and it is the only part you can rehearse the shape of in advance.

Speaking Part 2 cue cards with their Part 3 follow-ups Using your one minute of preparation

How is IELTS Speaking marked? Four criteria, a quarter each

Your Speaking band is the mean of four criterion bands, rounded to the nearest half. Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation. Each is a quarter of the result, which is the fact that reorganises most people's preparation once they hear it. Fluency 7, Lexical Resource 7, Grammar 7 and Pronunciation 5 averages 6.5, and no amount of extra vocabulary will move it, because vocabulary is not the criterion holding it down. Pronunciation is the one candidates most often leave entirely unpractised, and it carries exactly as much weight as grammar. So the useful question after a practice attempt is not "was that good" but "which of the four was lowest", and then whether the answer is the same one three attempts in a row.

How IELTS band scores are calculated The four features the pronunciation criterion measures

What does band 7 speaking actually sound like, next to band 6?

The public descriptors separate band 6 from band 7 on control and sustainability, not on ambition. A band 6 candidate and a band 7 candidate attempt many of the same things. The band 7 candidate keeps them going. Here is each criterion on either side of the line, paraphrased from the public band descriptors.

Paraphrased from the public IELTS Speaking Band Descriptors published by Cambridge (UCLES). Note the last cell: pronunciation is written out at bands 4, 6, 8 and 9 only, and bands 5 and 7 are defined as sitting between the two around them. That is why pronunciation feedback that names a specific habit is worth more than a number.

What every band from 4 to 9 means

A full Part 2 answer, and what it does differently

The table above describes band 7 in adjectives, and a description is not a sound. So here is a whole answer to read instead, followed by the specific things it does that the right-hand column asks for. The card asks you to describe a teacher who had a positive influence on you, and to say who they were, what they taught, what was special about their teaching, and how they influenced you. One of the model answers in the speaking bank runs 177 words, and this is all of it: "The teacher I'd like to talk about is Mr. Carter, who taught me English literature in my final two years of school. He was unusual because he didn't really lecture us. Instead, he'd hand out a poem on a Monday morning and ask us to argue about what it meant for the rest of the week. At first I found this frustrating. I wanted him to just tell us the answer. But over time I realised he was teaching us how to think, not what to think. What was special about his teaching was the respect he showed for our opinions, even when they were obviously wrong. He'd say 'interesting, why do you think that' and then push us to defend it. He influenced me by changing my relationship with reading. Before his class, I read passively. After it, I started underlining things, arguing with the author in the margins, and asking why a writer made specific choices. That habit has stayed with me ever since, and I still think of him whenever I read something challenging." Read that as a shape to copy, not a script to learn. Examiners are trained to recognise rehearsed speech and it is marked down under Fluency and Coherence, so what is worth taking is the moves rather than the sentences: one real person, two short anecdotes instead of general praise, and a last bullet answered with something that changed.

One of the 81 cards in the speaking bank, each of which carries a model answer for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. The rows above describe what this answer does. They are not a band awarded to it: no certified examiner has marked any script on this site, and the honest reading of a model answer is as a worked example rather than as a graded one.

More Part 2 cue cards Record your own long turn free

Does my accent affect my IELTS Speaking score?

No, and this is worth believing rather than half-believing, because a lot of preparation time is wasted on it. There is no score for sounding British or American, and no descriptor anywhere in the public band descriptors rewards one accent over another. What is marked is intelligibility, together with control of word stress, sentence stress, rhythm and intonation. The band 8 descriptor is explicit about it: a first-language accent is fine at band 8 provided it has minimal effect on how easily you are understood. Your accent becomes a problem only at the point where a listener has to work to follow you. So the productive drill is not accent reduction. It is the individual sounds and stress patterns that make a particular word of yours land wrong, which is a much shorter list and a much faster fix.

What this tool can hear, and what it cannot

Worth being plain about, because it decides how much to trust each of the four numbers. Your recording is transcribed by OpenAI Whisper, and the four criteria are then scored from that transcript. Fluency, vocabulary and grammar survive transcription intact: hesitation markers, repetition, self-correction, the range of your structures and your actual errors are all there in the words. Pronunciation does not. The pronunciation band here is inferred from the transcript rather than measured from the audio waveform, so it is the weakest of the four numbers and the one to check against a teacher before you act on it. Related, and stated for the same reason: we publish a measured scoring deviation every week for Writing and we do not publish one for Speaking, because there is no labelled speaking ground truth here to measure against. Treat the Speaking band as a guide to what to practise next, not as a prediction of your test-day result. The examiner voice is also synthetic, a text to speech voice with British English delivery rather than a recording of a person, and no human examiner is involved at any point.

What we measure weekly, and what we do not How accurate AI speaking scores are

How do I practise IELTS Speaking on my own, with nobody to practise against?

This is the real constraint for most candidates, and the answer is narrower than "speak more English". Record a timed answer to a question you have not seen, listen back once, then read your own words written out. The transcript is the part that does the work, because the habits costing you marks are the ones you cannot hear while you are producing them: the fourteen uses of "actually", the sentence you restarted three times, the complex structure you began and abandoned. Four rules make solo practice behave like the real thing. Use a real one-minute preparation for Part 2 and stop when it stops. Speak until you are told to stop rather than until you run out, because finishing early costs marks under Fluency and Coherence. Never work from a memorised script, since examiners are trained to spot rehearsed speech and it is penalised under the same criterion. And change the question every time, so you are practising thinking in English rather than reciting one answer well.

Giving extended answers in Part 3 What to say instead of um

What is actually in the speaking bank

81 speaking exercises, and every one of them carries all three parts: the Part 1 interview questions, a Part 2 cue card with its bullet points, and the Part 3 discussion questions that follow from it. That matters more than the headline number, because a Part 2 card practised without the Part 3 discussion behind it trains half the skill. There is also a full timed mock test that draws a fresh Part 1 set, cue card and Part 3 set each time you start one, so two attempts are rarely the same exam, with a real 60 second preparation timer on the long turn and an optional camera if you want to see what you do with your hands. If you would rather not start with a whole test, the free diagnostic runs a 5 question version: three Part 1 questions, one cue card with the full two minutes, and one Part 3 question. The free tier includes 3 scored speaking attempts with all four criteria, no card and no account needed to begin.

Speaking Part 2 cue cards The full practice library Record a speaking answer free