The IELTS Speaking test assesses your ability to communicate in English. The examiner awards band scores for your spoken English-language skills. The IELTS Speaking test will take place in a face-to-face interview with a qualified IELTS Examiner in a quiet room. Speaking tests are conducted by trained and certified IELTS Examiners. They must hold a relevant teaching qualification and have extensive teaching experience to become an IELTS Examiner. When assessing your performance, they work with clearly defined criteria to assess your IELTS Speaking Test.
Examiners assess your performance against 4 criteria. Fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. Your IELTS Speaking results are given as band scores which range from a band 0 to a band 9. Each whole and half band score corresponds to a level of English-language competence. To find out more about the assessment criteria used by IELTS examiners, search online for the IELTS Speaking public band descriptors.
Ask IELTS
Yes. Computer-delivered IELTS provides a note-taking and highlight function. You can try these functions on the familiarisation tests here. You can also write notes on the login details sheet you receive at the beginning of the test.
The Listening, Reading, and Writing parts of the test are completed immediately after each other on the same day. In some test centres, you will sit the Speaking test on the same day, or up to 7 days before or after your test date.
If you take computer-delivered IELTS, the Speaking test will be taken on the same day, either before, or after the other three parts of the test.
If you choose to take IELTS on computer, you will take the Listening, Reading and Writing test parts using a computer.
If you choose to take the IELTS on paper, you will complete the Listening, Reading and Writing test parts on paper.
The Speaking test for both paper and computer are face to face with an examiner. This is the best way to measure your speaking skills as it takes a more realistic approach: a life-like conversation with an examiner.
