Ielts speaking Tips 9 Steps To a High Score in Your Speaking Test

Answer the question.

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  Answer using the same tense as in the question.
  

For practice, get a friend to ask you some simple questions using past, present and future tenses and see if you can quickly identify the verb tense in each one.

Here are three examples:

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  What did you have for breakfast this morning? (Past tense)
  

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  Do you like Sally’s new hair style? (Present tense)
  

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  Where do you want to go on holiday next year? (Future tense)
  

Tip 8: Focus on Fluency

For the next of our IELTS Speaking tips, we’re going to go a step further with the technique I introduced you to in Tip 1 – learning to think in English.

Poor fluency is often caused by the fear of making mistakes. This leads to the speaker pausing and hesitating far too much or speaking too slowly as they try to get their grammar and vocabulary perfect.

Since fluency carried 25% of the marks, you need to get a good balance between correct language and fluent speech. The only way to do this is to practise.

The method I’m going to suggest is something for you to do on your own so that you aren’t worried about making mistakes. There are many ways you could do it but here are two.

1) Towards the end of the day, think of one thing that went really well or that you are happy about and something that could have been better.

Talk out loud about them for 1 minute, focusing on fluency.

This will also be great practise for using the past tense, but also conditionals and modals (‘If I had…’ ‘I should have…’) which are more advanced grammar and will impress the examiner if you use them.

2) Choose a photo in a newspaper or magazine and talk out loud about it for at least 1 minute.

Here are a few ideas as to what to say:

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