Tips for Increasing your IELTS Speaking Band Score

• Make eye contact and smile (try to enjoy yourself).

• Emulate the test environment as best you can before you get there. Find a stranger (ideally a native speaker) who will help you. A good way to do this is to find a teacher who specializes in IELTS and ask them to go through the exam with you. Request that they try to emulate the test circumstances as closely as possible.

• If you can’t think of a vocabulary word, it is perfectly okay to paraphrase. For example, “Last weekend I went to the theater to see a show - you know, the type of show where the actors sing very beautifully in Italian, and there is live classical music.” This person can’t remember how to say “opera”, but they were able to describe the opera using other words.

• Similar to the writing exam, you should try not to copy the exact phrasing of the question in your answer. For example, if the question asks, “Who do you most admire?”, you could say something like “One of the people who I look up to the most is…”, instead of “the person I most admire is…”

• Make sure to expand upon your answers as much as possible. Always be thinking about the “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “how” and most importantly, “why”. Never answer a question with a simple “yes” or “no”.