Hello there, Lar Ryan here with IELTS Daily and today we have a special IELTS speaking test.
We have Maddie as our examiner, who you know very well, and we also have Julia, who is an Australian native English speaker, who is studying at university.
And she's doing a practice IELTS speaking test today and we'll get to see what a native English speaker really sounds like.
For those of you who don't know me already, my name is Larry Ryan and I've been an IELTS examiner for the writing and speaking components of the IELTS test.
I've been teaching IELTS since 2010 and I have my own YouTube channel called Complete Test Success.
Hello and welcome to this practice exam conducted by IELTS Daily.
My name is Maddy and I'm your practice IELTS speaking examiner.
The questions in this test are designed to simulate the IELTS speaking test.
Let's start.
What's your first name, please?
Julia.
Thanks, Julia.
Are you ready to begin?
Yes, I am.
Let's talk about your hometown.
Do you live in a city, in a town or in the country?
So originally, I'm actually from Sydney.
So Sydney is a coastal town, so it's near the beach.
A lot of things that you can do near the beach include swimming.
You can go for walks.
It's really lovely.
I now actually live in Melbourne, so that's more of a city and urban town.
So things that you can do are shopping.
You can go walking again, but through the streets this time as opposed to near the beach.
Both cities are lovely and I'm very happy, yeah.
Now a very important part of your fluency and coherence score is your use of discourse markers.
And what you may or may not have noticed is that Julia, as a native English speaker, uses them a lot.
In fact, in that short answer she used 14 discourse markers.
So she used the word originally.
She used the word actually on two occasions to show the examiner that they might be surprised by this information.
She used the word so to give herself time to think, and she used the word am in the same way.
She also said again, but this time as opposed to, and at the end of her answer she said yeah, to indicate that she had finished speaking.
What is the best thing about living where you live?
I think that the best thing about where I'm living is its proximity to the city.
So where I live is nice and close.
Public transport is really good.
It's very easy to get around.
If I ever need to get something or I need to do something, it's really, really easy to do that.
And I can usually get there in a really short period of time.
And also, of course, we see that she's got great pronunciation.
And right at the end, you hear the way she uses connected speech in a really short period of time.
The way it sounds like one very long word as opposed to many individual words in a really short period of time.
The way the words connect with each other, the way she drops sounds, the way she connects sounds.
All of these features of connected speech are very, very important for your pronunciation score.
And, of course, as a native English speaker, it's very easy for her.
But you do see the difference when you have a candidate who is a native English speaker compared to somebody who is learning the language.
Would you like to live somewhere different?
I would definitely love to live somewhere overseas, potentially France, because I'm learning French, so it would be lovely to be able to practice my French and experience another culture and get to know a whole new group of people.
I think that would be really cool.
I'd like to move on to the topic of jokes.
Are you good at remembering jokes?
No.
I'm not very good at remembering jokes, I'm not going to lie.
My dad always loved to tell jokes and I think that because he loved jokes so much, I always became deterred from them.
Typical dad jokes, but yeah.
What type of jokes do you like?
I think that I usually prefer the types of jokes that are more like riddles, where they have sort of a story to them.
So you get invested in the story and it goes on for a while and then you have the punchline at the end.
That's the sort of joke that I prefer as opposed to the short witty jokes.
Okay now, after listening to Julia give a few more answers, what you probably notice is that she is not flawless.
She needs to stop, she needs to pause, she needs to think.
Sometimes she's not completely flawless in the way you would find when you're watching a TV show or a movie where the whole dialogue is scripted and the actors are repeating what they've learned.
So in the real world, English speaking is not as flawless as you see on TV.
So what we see from Julia here is exactly what the examiner is looking for when someone's going to achieve a band nine.
Do you enjoy watching comedy shows on TV?
I do.
I enjoy watching comedy shows on TV.
I also actually went to a comedy show about two nights ago, which was really fun to watch.
Really interesting to see some people live speaking.
Definitely the standard of comedy was very different between the professionals on comedy shows and a local comedy stand-up competition, but nonetheless it was really enjoyable.
Now, let's think about the topic of gardening.
Do you have a garden where you live?
Actually live in an apartment, so I don't have a garden.
However, we do have a large balcony and on the balcony we have lots of plants.
There's a veggie garden.
Most of the plants are in pots and it's quite nice because I have two dogs so they love to run around and frolic near the plants, I guess.
Okay, so we've pretty much watched all of her part.
One answers already and you might be thinking well, Julia's vocabulary isn't that great.
I know most of this vocabulary myself already, so why is she going to get such a high score with vocabulary that I know?
The reality is, when you're in the IELTS test, you're not trying to use vocabulary that nobody knows.
You're trying to use vocabulary that everybody knows.
Using normal, everyday vocabulary is what will get you a high score.
But it's using it accurately and using it in the correct context.
And then, for whatever topic that you're discussing, having that specific topic-related language that will show that you have a wide range is what gets you a high score.
So if you've been learning special words for the IELTS test that you think are impressive and that will get you a high score, what you see from Julia's performance here is that that is not what the examiner is actually looking for.
And do you like gardening?
I do like gardening, actually, because we have the veggie patch.
I really enjoy planting different vegetables.
I often do this with my mum, because she's very passionate about cooking and using different vegetables and herbs.
So quite often I will help her out there.
Yeah.
And do you know anyone else who does a lot of gardening?
My grandmother loves gardening.
She has a really, really large property and there are lots of different plants.
And again, she has a veggie patch.
And she spends almost all day, every day out in the garden gardening, using all sorts of different tools and planting different vegetables.
And, similar to my mum, she likes to use the vegetables that she plants and that she grows, and she uses them to cook, which I think is really cool.
And would you like to have a big garden in the future?
I think I would like to have a big garden in the future.
There's something really nice about being around nature and around plants.
And again, that aspect of the veggie garden is something that I really like and I would like to incorporate that into my home when I'm older and in the future.
Another important aspect of your pronunciation score is that you use intonation correctly.
And of course, as a native English speaker, Julia is doing this.
So one thing that you may notice is when she's speaking, if she's not finished yet, she'll go up.
So if there's going to be a pause, she goes up.
That will indicate to the examiner that she's not finished yet.
She'll say some more, and then she says some more, and then at the end, when she's finished, she goes down.
If you pay attention to that, you'll notice how she's communicating with her intonation, as well as with her vocabulary.
Part two.
In the next part of the test, I'm going to give you a topic and I would like you to speak on this for one to two minutes.
You will have one minute to think about what you want to say and I will give you a pen and some paper to make notes if you want.
Is that clear?
Yes.
So here is your pen and here is your paper.
You have one minute to prepare.
Thank you Now, I would like you to talk about the first phone you had.
Remember, you have one to two minutes for this, so don't worry if I stop you.
I'll tell you when the time is up.
Can you start speaking now, please?
Okay, so the first phone that I owned was when I was in Year 6.
It was actually a gift from my godmother for my birthday and it was a pink Nokia flip phone.
And I remember when I first got it I was so happy because it was my first phone and I could call and text my friends and it was really exciting and the phone had a cool retro design and so I loved my phone so much and I used it all the time.
And then I remember as the iPhone came out, all of my friends in year six were getting iPhones, which was ridiculous.
Now that I look back at it,
But I remember being so jealous of all my friends who had this, these groovy, cutting edge iPhones with touchscreens.
Um, and I had my little cute retro Nokia.
Um, but I look back at it and I almost want to have a Nokia again.
Now I kind of miss my phone because I think it was really nice to be able to focus just on contacting friends.
And I think that's what phones originally, that's what their purpose was.
So you couldn't contact anyone from anywhere and just stay in contact and connected with everyone.
And I kind of missed that aspect.
I think that phones are very convenient now, but I think there's almost too many things that you can do on the phone.
So yeah, I think it would always be nice to have the technology revert a little bit and go back in time a little bit and get back to those, to those basics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think that if I had my time again, I would have kept my my original Nokia phone for as long as possible.
And I'm glad that my parents did keep me with the same phone for the following, I think, two or three years.
So yeah.
Thank you.
No worries.
Okay, I'm sure you noticed that at one minute and 40 seconds, Julia had no idea what to say next.
She pretty much concluded her answer, but then, even though we couldn't see Maddie on camera, we're pretty sure she did something like this to indicate to Julia that the time wasn't up and she needed to stay speaking.
And this shows us just how hard it really is to continue speaking on a topic for a full two minutes.
So if it's difficult for a native English speaker in their own language, of course it's going to be challenging for you as well, in a second language.
So, do lots of preparation for IELTS Speaking Part 2.
Make sure you've prepared yourself by practicing many, many different topics, many different Part 2 cue cards and getting comfortable with the note-taking process in the one minute to make notes so that you can comfortably continue speaking for a full two minutes when you're in your IELTS speaking test.
Now, part three.
I want to stay on the topic of communication.
Has our ability to communicate with each other improved over the last 50 years?
I think this is an interesting question because I think that obviously it has with the increase of technology.
So what I was saying before about how we can contact people on mobile phones we can send messages, we can send photos.
Things like FaceTime and video chat make it really accessible to contact people when you're not physically with them.
Having said that, when you are physically with people, I think our ability to communicate has actually decreased because we lose those skills when we become so used to contacting people exclusively by technology. you do lose that capacity to have real meaningful connections face to face.
So I think that that's definitely something a way that our communication has actually reduced.
Yeah.
And can body language help you communicate better?
Yes, definitely.
And this sort of flows on from that idea about face to face communication, because when obviously, when you contact people through a phone or through a computer, it's very difficult to sense that body language.
So being in person and being able to read people's body language and, you know, get vibes, i guess, from people you could say it's really, really important.
It's really difficult to achieve that through technology.
And if you were having a difficult conversation with someone, would you prefer to have it over the phone or in person?
I would always prefer to have those sorts of conversations in person because I think it really is important to sort of connect with the other person in terms of seeing, like visually, how they're reacting and be able to sort of match my reactions and my communication styles to how that other person is feeling, so that you can both be on the same page and you can adjust, because those things you just couldn't do via text or call.
Right.
So after listening to quite a few of Julia's part three answers, what we notice is that she's really good at developing them.
She answers the question, and then she goes into more detail.
She never gives short answers.
And then on the other side is she doesn't stay going on forever and ever, so that the examiner has to interrupt her.
Julia gives a nice amount of development, enough that the answer is strongly supported, and then she finishes, waits for the next question and starts again.
And why is it important to understand how different cultures communicate?
I think it's really important because, as we've seen through the increase of technology, communication within a single culture can change so much over a period of time.
So seeing how different cultures vary in terms of communication style, it just shows you that it's really really necessary to appreciate and understand how those variations are sort of crucial to understanding the cultures, of course, but then also understanding communication itself, because there is such a vast variety and there is no right or wrong way.
Thank you.
That is the end of this practice IELTS speaking test.
Thank you.
So Julia, how was that for you?
That was good.
I think I really liked the questions, actually.
I thought they were really interesting topics and I think it went pretty well.
And did you find any of the questions hard?
I actually found the gardening questions difficult ironically, because I think it's difficult to elaborate on questions that are quite specific.
So, yeah.
And did you make any noticeable mistakes?
I think, as opposed to grammatical mistakes.
I think there were definitely a few times where I sort of went in circles and rambled on a little bit.
But yeah.
Do you remember any of the questions?
And if you do, can you remind us what they were?
Because sometimes after an exam, it is really hard to remember what questions you were asked.
Um, to the best of my memory, the exam started with questions about my hometown and where I lived.
Um, that was followed by a question about whether or not I liked where I lived.
I'm pretty sure.
Um, and then there were questions about if I had a garden and if I do gardening um, and then if anyone I know does a lot of gardening.
And I think that was followed by the question about my first phone.
And then after that was about communication styles and the importance of body language and whether or not we need to appreciate and accept and understand communication styles from different cultures.
Yeah.
Well done.
You just missed out on the jokes topic, which talked about jokes.
Do you like jokes?
What TV shows do you watch and what kind of jokes you actually like?
Of course.
Okay, so we've seen a lot of great language from Julia.
I really enjoyed listening to her answers myself, and I hope you did as well.
Now it's time to give her her scores, and this is an incredibly easy task for me or for any IELTS examiner, and I'm sure you would agree on these scores.
Fluency and coherence is a band 9.
Lexical resource is a band 9, grammatical range and accuracy is a band nine and, of course, pronunciation is about nine.
Overall band nine great performance, but of course she's a native english speaker, so it is not that surprising if you are aiming for a high score yourself.
Hopefully you've learned some things from julia's performance and you can put those into action as well.
Let us know in the comments what did you learn from watching Julia perform and what did you enjoy about listening to her answers?
Hello and welcome to this practice exam conducted by IELTS Daily.
My name is Maddie and I am your practice IELTS speaking examiner.
The questions in this test are designed to simulate the IELTS speaking test.
Let's start.
What's your first name please?
Julia.
Thanks Julia.
Are you ready to begin?
Yes I am.
Let's talk about your hometown.
Do you live in a city, in a town or in the country?
So originally, I'm actually from Sydney.
So Sydney is a coastal town, so it's near the beach.
So A lot of things that you can do near the beach include swimming.
You can go for walks.
It's really lovely.
I now actually live in Melbourne, so that's more of a city, an urban town.
So things that you can do are shopping.
You can go walking again, but through the streets this time as opposed to near the beach.
Both cities are lovely and I'm very happy, yeah.
What is the best thing about living where you live?
I think that the best thing about where I'm living is its proximity to the city.
So where I live is nice and close.
Public transport is really good.
It's very easy to get around.
If I ever need to get something or I need to do something, it's really, really easy to do that.
And I can usually get there in a really short period of time.
Would you like to live somewhere different?
I would definitely love to live somewhere overseas, potentially France, because I'm learning French.
So it would be lovely to be able to practice my French and experience another culture and get to know a whole new group of people.
I think that would be really cool.
I'd like to move on to the topic of jokes.
Are you good at remembering jokes?
No.
I'm not very good at remembering jokes, I'm not going to lie.
My dad always loved to tell jokes and I think that because he loved jokes so much, I always became deterred from them.
Typical dad jokes, but yeah.
What type of jokes do you like?
I think that I usually prefer the types of jokes that are more like riddles, where they have sort of a story to them.
So you get invested in the story and it goes on for a while and then you have the punchline at the end.
That's the sort of joke that I prefer as opposed to the short witty jokes.
Do you enjoy watching comedy shows on TV?
I do.
I enjoy watching comedy shows on TV.
I also actually went to a comedy show about two nights ago which was really fun to watch, really interesting to see some people live speaking.
Definitely, the standard of comedy was very different between the professionals on comedy shows and a local comedy stand up competition.
But nonetheless, it was really enjoyable.
Now, let's think about the topic of gardening.
Do you have a garden where you live?
I actually live in an apartment, so I don't have a garden.
However, we do have a large balcony and on the balcony we have lots of plants.
There's a veggie garden.
Most of the plants are in pots and it's quite nice because I have two dogs so they love to run around and frolic near the plants, I guess.
And do you like gardening?
I do like gardening, actually, because we have the veggie patch.
I really enjoy planting different vegetables.
I often do this with my mum, because she's very passionate about cooking and using different vegetables and herbs.
So quite often I will help her out there.
Yeah.
And do you know anyone else who does a lot of gardening?
My grandmother loves gardening.
She has a really, really large property and there are lots of different plants.
And again, she has a veggie patch and she spends almost all day, every day, out in the garden gardening, using all sorts of different tools and planting different vegetables.
And, similar to my mum, she likes to use the vegetables that she plants and that she grows, and she uses them to cook, which I think is really cool.
And would you like to have a big garden in the future?
I think I would like to have a big garden in the future.
There's something really nice about being around nature and around plants and again, that aspect of the veggie garden is something that I really like and I would like to incorporate that into my home when I'm older and in the future.
Part two.
In the next part of the test, I'm going to give you a topic and I would like you to speak on this for one to two minutes.
You will have one minute to think about what you want to say and I will give you a pen and some paper to make notes if you want.
Is that clear?
Yes.
So here is your pen and here is your paper.
You have one minute to prepare.
Thank you.
Now, I would like you to talk about the first phone you had.
Remember, you have one to two minutes for this, so don't worry if I stop you.
I'll tell you when the time is up.
Can you start speaking now, please?
Okay, so the first phone that I owned was when I was in Year 6.
It was actually a gift from my godmother for my birthday and it was a pink Nokia flip phone.
And i remember when i first got it i was so happy because it was my first phone and i could call and text my friends.
It was really exciting and the phone had a cool retro design and so i loved my phone so much and i used it all the time.
And then i remember as the iphone came out, all of my friends in year six were getting iPhones, which was ridiculous.
Now that I look back at it,
But I remember being so jealous of all my friends who had this, these groovy, cutting edge iPhones with touchscreens.
Um, and I had my little cute retro Nokia.
Um, but I look back at it and I almost want to have a Nokia again.
Now I kind of miss my phone because I think it was really nice to be able to focus just on contacting friends, and I think that's what phones originally, that's what their purpose was, so you couldn't contact anyone from anywhere and just stay in contact and connected with everyone, and I kind of miss that aspect.
I think that phones are very convenient now, but I think there's almost too many things that you can do on a phone.
So yeah, I think it would always be nice to have the technology revert a little bit and go back in time a little bit and get back to those, to those basics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think that if I had my time again, I would have kept my my original Nokia phone for as long as possible.
And I'm glad that my parents did keep me with the same phone for the following, I think, two or three years.
So yeah.
Thank you.
No worries.
Now, part three, I want to stay on the topic of communication.
Has our ability to communicate with each other improved over the last 50 years?
I think this is an interesting question because I think that obviously it has with the increase of technology.
So what I was saying before about how we can contact people on mobile phones we can send messages, we can send photos.
Things like FaceTime and video chat make it really accessible to contact people when you're not physically with them.
Having said that, when you are physically with people, I think our ability to communicate has actually decreased because we lose those skills.
When we become so used to contacting people exclusively via technology, you do lose that capacity to have real, meaningful connections face to face.
So I think that that's definitely something, a way that our communication has actually reduced.
Yeah.
And can body language help you communicate better?
Yes, definitely.
And this sort of flows on from that idea about face to face communication, because when obviously, when you contact people through a phone or through a computer, it's very difficult to sense that body language.
So being in person and being able to read people's body language and, you know, get vibes, I guess, from people you could say.
It's really, really important.
It's really difficult to achieve that through technology.
And if you were having a difficult conversation with someone, would you prefer to have it over the phone or in person?
I would always prefer to have those sorts of conversations in person, because I think it really is important to sort of connect with the other person in terms of seeing, like visually, how they're reacting, and be able to sort of match my reactions and my communication styles to how that other person is feeling, so that you can both be on the same page and you can adjust, because those things you just couldn't do via text or call.
And why is it important to understand how different cultures communicate?
I think it's really important because, as we've seen through the increase of technology, communication within a single culture can change so much over a period of time.
So and so, seeing how different cultures vary in terms of communication style, it just shows you that it's really really necessary to appreciate and understand how those variations are sort of crucial to understanding the cultures, of course, but then also understanding communication itself, because there is such a vast variety and there is no right or wrong way.
Thank you.
That is the end of this practice IELTS speaking test.
Thank you.
So, Julia, how was that for you?
That was good.
I think I really liked the questions, actually.
I thought they were really interesting topics and I think it went pretty well.
And did you find any of the questions hard?
I actually found the gardening questions difficult ironically, because I think it's difficult to elaborate on questions that are quite specific.
So, yeah.
And did you make any noticeable mistakes?
I think, as opposed to grammatical mistakes.
I think there were definitely a few times where I sort of went in circles and rambled on a little bit.
But yeah.
Do you remember any of the questions?
And if you do, can you remind us what they were?
Because sometimes after an exam, it is really hard to remember what questions you were asked.
To the best of my memory, the exam started with questions about my hometown and where I lived.
That was followed by a question about whether or not I liked where I lived, I'm pretty sure.
And then there were questions about if I had a garden and if I do gardening.
And then if anyone I know does a lot of gardening.
And I think that was followed by the question about my first phone.
And then, after that was about communication styles and the importance of body language and whether or not we need to appreciate and accept and understand communication styles from different cultures.
Yeah, well done.
You just missed out on the jokes topic, which talked about jokes.
Do you like jokes?
What tv shows do you watch and what kind of jokes you actually like?
Of course, Great.
Well, I'm sure Chris will have some more in-depth feedback for you.
And thank you so much.
Fabulous.
Thank you.
