Every IELTS teacher at CIE Oxford has met this student: relaxed in conversation, quick with a joke, able to talk about anything from football to their home town – and stuck at 6.0 in Speaking. Their English is comfortable. Their score will not move. The problem is almost never fluency. It is technique: knowing what the examiner is trained to listen for, and noticing what you, without meaning to, keep failing to provide.
This is the speaking companion to our March guide, IELTS Reading and Listening: Six Technique Mistakes That Cost You Marks. The argument is the same one, transferred to a different room: IELTS does not only measure your English. It measures how efficiently you give evidence of it.
What the IELTS Speaking examiner is actually scoring
The Speaking test lasts eleven to fourteen minutes and is marked against four criteria, each worth a quarter of your band: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation. Confidence is not on the list. Neither is charm. An examiner can enjoy every minute of your company and still be obliged to write 6.0, because the band descriptors ask for evidence, not impressions.
The gap between 6.0 and 7.0 is specific. At band 7 you speak at length without noticeable effort. You use some less common vocabulary and paraphrase smoothly when a word escapes you. You produce frequent error-free sentences and a range of complex structures, not just safe ones. Your pronunciation does work – stress and intonation that carry meaning, rather than a steady stream of accurate but flat sound.
A fluent student who answers every question in short, simple, correct sentences gives the examiner nothing to score above 6. The conversation feels pleasant. The scoresheet stays empty.
The five habits that hold a score at 6.0
Memorised answers. Examiners hear rehearsed material every day and are trained to move past it – expect a sudden change of direction if your Part 1 answer about your hobbies sounds pre-packed. Memorised language cannot be credited as your own, so the polish you spent hours building produces no usable evidence at all.
One-sentence answers in Part 3. Part 3 is where band 7 is won or lost. The questions turn abstract – should governments fund the arts, will people read fewer books in future – precisely because abstraction forces the functions the higher bands describe: speculating, comparing, justifying an opinion. Answer in one sentence and you have declined the invitation. The examiner cannot score what you did not say.
Safe vocabulary. “Good”, “bad”, “nice” and “interesting” will carry you through any conversation and cap your Lexical Resource at 6. The band 7 descriptor asks for less common and idiomatic language used with some awareness of style. That does not mean rare words. It means natural ones chosen well: “exhausting” instead of “very tiring”, “I’m torn” instead of “I don’t know which”.
Showing off instead of paraphrasing. The opposite trap. Students memorise expensive words and spend them in the wrong shops; “plethora” used wrongly costs more than “plethora” never used, because accuracy is scored alongside range. What the descriptors quietly reward is paraphrase – the moment a word escapes you at speed and you talk your way around it without stopping. That is band 7 behaviour. A long silence while you hunt for the impressive option is not.
Flat delivery. Pronunciation is not accent. Examiners are told explicitly that accent is no barrier; what they assess is whether stress, rhythm and intonation help a listener follow you. We wrote about this melodic layer in The Music of English – in the test, it is a quarter of your mark. An answer delivered in a careful monotone reads, on the scoresheet, as limited pronunciation features, however accurate the grammar underneath.
Training for the test you are actually taking
The fixes are unglamorous and they work. Record yourself giving two-minute Part 2 answers against a timer, then listen for the hesitations and the words you repeat. Build a develop-by-default habit for Part 3: every answer gets an opinion, a reason and an example before you allow yourself to stop. Run paraphrase drills – take ten words you know and define each without using the word itself. And practice with someone who can tell you what an examiner would hear, because these are habits, and habits do not change by being read about.
IELTS preparation in Oxford
The IELTS course at CIE Oxford is built around exactly this kind of feedback. Classes rarely exceed eight students, so speaking practice is constant rather than occasional, and mock speaking tests come with criterion-by-criterion notes – which of the four scores is holding you back, and what to do about it. Then you step out of Bocardo House and the city carries on the lesson: every café order, every conversation at the homestay dinner table, is Part 1 practice with the stakes removed.
Autumn test dates have a way of arriving faster than planned. The students who move from 6.0 to 7.0 are rarely the ones who learned more English over the summer. They are the ones who learned what the examiner was listening for – and started giving it, sentence by sentence, until it became the way they speak.
