It’s not too hard to estimate your IELTS score in Listening or Reading – all you need to do is take a practice test and count how many correct answers you had. But how do you find out your score in Speaking? Here’s a hint: you need to get someone to help you, which is exactly what Arun in this video is doing. And it’s a good thing he got an early Speaking assessment, because his Speaking score turned out to be Band 6, which is lower than the score he needs. So this experience saved Arun from taking the IELTS test too early and wasting his money, and he also received a list of things to work on, plus suggestions how to deal with his weaknesses and increase his score.
In the video you’re about to watch Arun, an IELTS test taker from India, is answering typical IELTS Speaking questions. You can see the breakdown of his score by 4 IELTS criteria (Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation) at the end of the video, and also in his evaluation report here.
The questions are shown on the screen while Arun answers them. You will see that every question has a number (Q1, Q2, etc) and the examiner in his evaluation report is referring to Arun’s little mistakes in every question. It’s great to watch the entire video first, and then go back to the specific questions as you read the evaluation report. It will help you understand what exactly the examiner means when he says something like
Q7 – ‘as well as’ not used correctly: ‘we can go by bus, as well as we can go by car’ should be: ‘we can go by bus as well as by car’’; ‘why I like this restaurant’ should be followed by the verb ‘to be’ – ‘why I like this restaurant IS because’.
Download Arun’s speaking evaluation report here
It would be a good exercise for you to make a list of any mistakes or inaccuracies you hear while watching this video, and then compare your notes to the examiner’s feedback. What would you do better? What vocabulary could you use instead?
Try and answer the same questions in your own words, and perhaps even record yourself. It will provide an opportunity to listen to your pronunciation and see what needs work.