Myth Buster About IELTS Speaking Test

In todays article we will discuss about some Myths regarding IELTS Speaking Test and will put light on the facts.

1. Speaking is the Easiest Part:

Many candidates who are appearing for the IELTS exam think that speaking part of IELTS Exam is the easiest as it looks like the examiners are friendly whereas in the other parts of the exam you are on your own, so it may seem like you have someone to help you in this part but that is not case as the examiner is not here to help you but to examine you. He will be closely monitoring everything. The reason they look friendly is a protocol they have to follow to make the candidate friendly.

However, the examiner has to follow very strict rules so that all the candidates get the same treatment to ensure fairness. They evaluate all the candidates based on the same criteria.

The Fact: All the four sub-tests have the same level of difficulty.

2. Need of Native-like accent to get a high score.

Your accent is not an evaluation criterion. Your pronunciationskills are assessed.

When evaluating pronunciation, examiner pays attention to the candidates’ pronunciation of individual sounds, word stress and intonation. Your accent doesn’t fall under criteria.

3. Don’t use complex grammatical structures if you’re not sure about it:

This statement is partial correct and wrong. Attempting complex grammatical structures and make a 1-2 mistakes will boost your score rather than to just use very simple sentences but on the other hand if you will make more than 2-3 mistakes it will it will impact your score. Of course you should only use complex grammatical structures that accurately reflect what you want to say.

4. If you don’t know the answer to a question, you cannot get a high score.

IELTS is not your knowledge test it’s the test of your fluency in English language.If in-case you don’t have the knowledge of certain topics don’t worry it won’t be tested on this exam. The examiners are more interested in how you say things than what you say.

5. Always take notes while preparing for your Cue Card:

You may want to take notes, but sometimes it’s better to just think about the topic as you only have one minute to prepare. If you spend that time writing, you may waste valuable thinking time.

6. Good Grammar=Good score:

There are four evaluation criteria for your IELTS speaking test and grammar is just one of the four evaluation criteria.The others are fluency and coherence, lexical resource (vocabulary range) and pronunciation.

All of them are equally important. So if you are very good at grammar, one fourth of your final score will definitely be high. But if you want an overall high score, you need to also prove you have a wide vocabulary range.

7. If you don’t hesitate when speaking, you’ll make a good impression.

Fluency is important, but so is coherence (being logical, making sense). Trying to avoid hesitation is a good tip, but you also need to keep your answer logical means related to your question and organized.

If you keep talking and talking without making much sense, you are fluent, but you are not coherent. The overall impression will not be a good one. So, balance is very important. Talk without hesitation but make sure there is coherency.

8. Don’t ask to repeat the question:

If you don’t understand a question, you should not ask the examiner to repeat the question that’s a biggest myth. It is the best to clarify what is examiner asked for if you don’t understand the question rather than giving a wrong answer. In this case the examiner will think you didn’t understand the question so it’s the best to clarify the question before answering it.

9. You don’t need to cover all the parts of the task in part 2.

Your topic card in part 2 will have a main topic and around four questions on it. You actually have to speak about all of the questions, and spend an approximately equal amount of time on each of them.

If you have four questions on the topic card, you should spend around 30 seconds on each of them, speaking for a total of two minutes.

10. You can repeat your ideas of cue card in the follow up questions:

Basically, in Part 3 tests that is follow ups they check your ability to take the topic from part 2 further away from you, to speak more abstractly about areas of general interest. You should prove you are able to describe things in detail, compare and contrast ideas, generalize and draw conclusions. So repeating your ideas from part 2 will probably not answer the questions in part 3.

THANK YOU