口语

Speaking is 11 to 14 minutes with a real examiner, in three parts, and it is recorded. You are marked on four criteria, each 0 to 9, averaged into your Speaking band.

• Pronunciation is a quarter of the band. Most candidates spend none of their preparation on it, which makes it the cheapest quarter to improve.
• You are not marked on your opinions. There is no right answer. An interesting answer and a dull one score the same if the English is the same.
• Fluency is not speed. Speaking fast with no structure scores below speaking steadily with visible organisation.
• The examiner follows a script and controls the time. Being interrupted is normal and is not a bad sign.

Four to five minutes of questions about yourself: home, family, work, study, and two or three familiar topics.

• Never answer in one word. Do you like cooking? — Yes is a band-4 answer. The pattern is answer + one reason or example, two or three sentences.
• Yes, I do — I cook dinner most evenings because it's the one part of the day I'm not looking at a screen. That is the whole technique, and it works on every Part 1 question.
• Do not give a speech either. Part 1 has many questions; a 40-second answer costs you the chance to show range on the next one.
• Expect present, past and future in this part: do you…, did you… when you were younger, will you…. Answer in the tense you were asked in.
• Prepare topics, not scripts. A memorised answer is audible and is discounted.

You get a card with a topic and four prompts, one minute to prepare with paper and pencil, then you speak for two minutes. The examiner will not stop you early.

• Most candidates dry up at 45 seconds. That is the whole difficulty, and it is fixed by practice with a timer, not by better ideas.
• Use the preparation minute to write nouns, not sentences. Six to eight words, one or two per prompt. Sentences cannot be read aloud naturally; nouns trigger speech.
• The four prompts are your paragraphs, in order, and the last one — usually and explain why… — deserves the most time. Spend about 20 seconds on each of the first three and 50 on the last.
• If you finish early, go back and add detail: what it looked like, who else was there, how I felt at the time, what I would do differently. Detail is always available.
• Past tenses dominate this part, because most cards ask you to describe a time when…. Get the irregular verbs right; they are the errors an examiner cannot miss.
• It is fine to invent. Nobody is checking whether the story is true.

Four to five minutes of abstract discussion about the Part 2 topic, at a higher level.

• A one-sentence answer is the standard failure here. Part 3 is where the higher bands are won, and the skill is developing: state a view, give a reason, name an example, then consider the other side.
• Fluency here means continuity and organisation, not speed.
• Hedging 委婉表达 is grammar as well as politeness, and it shows range: it tends to be, it depends on, broadly speaking, I'd say, on the whole, that's probably truer of… than of….
• Disagree with the examiner when you want to; it is not rude, and it shows language: I see why people say that, but I'd argue…, That's true up to a point, although….
• Expect comparison (how has this changed?), speculation (what will happen…?) and evaluation (is that a good thing?). Each needs a different tense, which is exactly what criterion 3 is measuring.
• If you do not understand, ask: Sorry, do you mean… ? That costs nothing. Answering a question you did not understand costs marks.

Chinese-L1 pronunciation errors come from a small, enumerable set. Working on these four is worth more than any amount of general "speaking practice".

• Final consonants. Mandarin syllables end in a vowel, -n or -ng, so English final consonants get dropped or a vowel is added. Wanted becomes wan; desk becomes des. This one change does more for intelligibility than anything else on the list.
• -ed and plural -s. These are grammar and pronunciation. Dropping them is heard as a tense or number error as well as a pronunciation one, so it costs two criteria at once. Walked ends in a /t/ sound, needed gains a whole extra syllable, lived ends in a /d/ sound — three different endings.
• /θ/ and /ð/ (think, this) do not exist in Mandarin and usually become /s/ and /z/. Put the tongue tip between the teeth; it feels exaggerated and sounds correct.
• /l/, /n/ and /r/ at the start of a word, and /v/ versus /w/ — light / night, very / wery.
• A syllable 音节 is the unit stress sits on.
• Word stress 重音 in long words. phoTOgraphy, phoToGRAPHic, ecoNOMic, eCONomy. A word with the stress on the wrong syllable is often not recognised at all, even when every sound is right.
• Intonation 语调 is the tune of a sentence; sentence stress 句重音 is which words carry the weight.
• Sentence stress and intonation. English stresses the content words and reduces the rest, and a flat, evenly-stressed delivery is heard as monotonous. Rising intonation on a list, falling at the end of a statement.
• Record yourself for two minutes and listen back. It is uncomfortable and it is the fastest diagnostic available.

• Arrive with topics, not scripts. Memorised answers are recognised and discounted, and they fall apart when the follow-up question comes.
• Practise Part 2 with a timer, out loud, standing up, until two minutes is comfortable. That single habit is worth half a band.
• If you make a mistake, correct it once and move on. Repeatedly restarting a sentence damages Fluency more than the original error did.
• Speak at your normal pace. Speed is not fluency, and a nervous rush makes every pronunciation problem worse.
• Sources, checked on 19 September 2026: Speaking format, scoring in detail.