IELTS Speaking

300 IELTS Speaking questions.
One take tells you where you stand.

The IELTS Speaking test is eleven to fourteen minutes in three parts, marked on four equally weighted criteria. Two of those criteria are audible, and this is where you practise them: record an answer to a real question and sayit shows your pace, your pauses and every sound against its target, with an estimated band from those two things alone.
  • Free, no card
  • Real test timings
  • Every sound in IPA
  • 300 questions

Answer one now.

Ready·IELTS PART 1

What do you usually do in your free time?

00:0045s

Press record, answer out loud, then press again.

One free take on this device · no account · no card

Be clear about this

What the band here is, and is not

An estimate from two criteria

sayit's band is an estimate built from two things a microphone can actually measure — fluency and pronunciation. Lexical resource and grammatical range are marked by a human examiner and are not measured here. Use it as a trend across a fortnight, not as a verdict on one take.
The ladder

What each half band sounds like

  1. 5.0

    You can keep a conversation going, but the listener is doing some of the work. Meaning arrives; ease does not.

    Getting the message across

  2. 5.5

    You are understood almost all the time, but hesitation and sound slips keep interrupting the flow rather than punctuating it.

    Understood, with effort

  3. 6.0

    You talk at length without long silences. Slips happen and sometimes a word has to be worked out, but the conversation does not stop for them.

    Keeping going

  4. 6.5

    You speak at a steady pace and are understood without effort. The occasional wrong sound does not change the word, and the listener stops noticing your accent.

    Steady

  5. 7.0

    You speak at length without noticeable effort. There are still slips, but you repair them mid-sentence without breaking the rhythm, and the listener never has to reconstruct anything.

    Comfortable

  6. 7.5

    Effortless to listen to. You vary pitch and pace on purpose, and the emphasis tells the listener which part of the sentence is the point.

    Deliberate

  7. 8.0

    Fluent, precise and easy. Hesitation appears only when the idea is genuinely hard, and the accent no longer affects clarity at all.

    Fluent and precise

  8. 8.5

    Everything at 8.0, sustained across the whole test, including the topics you have never thought about.

    Near-expert

  9. 9.0

    Complete command. The question of clarity does not arise, and the speaker uses the language as flexibly as a well-educated first-language speaker.

    Expert user

sayit's band is an estimate built from two things a microphone can actually measure — fluency and pronunciation. Lexical resource and grammatical range are marked by a human examiner and are not measured here.

The bank

Find a question — all 300 of them

300 questions

Showing the first 120. Narrow it with a topic or a search term to see the rest.

Questions

Straight answers

How long is the IELTS Speaking test?

Eleven to fourteen minutes in total, in three parts: a short interview of four to five minutes, a two-minute long turn with one minute of preparation, and a discussion of four to five minutes. It is face to face with a human examiner and it is recorded.

Is the Speaking test the same for Academic and General Training?

Yes, identical. Only the Reading and Writing papers differ between the two versions, so every question, cue card and model answer on this site applies to either.

What does sayit actually measure?

Fluency and pronunciation, from your audio: pace, long pauses and where they fall, filler words, pitch range, and every sound against its target in IPA. It does not measure lexical resource or grammatical range, which are marked by a human examiner, and the band it shows is an estimate built from the two criteria it can hear.

How accurate is the band estimate?

It is calibrated to those two criteria and capped at 8.5, deliberately, because the criteria we cannot hear are the ones that separate the top of the scale. Treat it as a trend: one take can be off by half a band, and two weeks of daily takes is honest.

Can I use these questions for a mock test?

Yes. Take one Part 1 set, one Part 2 card with a real one-minute preparation, and four or five Part 3 questions on the same theme, and you have the shape of the test. The timings on every page here match the exam.

Are these real IELTS questions?

They are original questions written to the format and difficulty of the test, not past papers. Recycled exam items are copyrighted and, more importantly, memorising them is the habit examiners are trained to hear.

Practise this question

One cue card a day until your test

Set your test date and get a question every morning, with an estimated band after each answer and the two things to fix next. Free account, no card.