When you are preparing for the IELTS Speaking test, it’s really important to improve your fluency. Here’s an idea that might help. But first, what is fluency? Fluency is the ability to “keep going”, to produce continuous speech and not have to stop and pause a lot. Fluency is one of the marking criteria in the IELTS Speaking test.

A simple exercise

First, remember that you can only build fluency by putting in lots of practice. Here’s a way of doing it.

Join with a few friends to practice for Part 2 of the IELTS Speaking test, which is the 1-2 minute talk. Each person writes a topic on a piece of paper, folds it up and puts it in a bowl. Topics might be a friend, a book, an advertisement, a building or a TV show. Then, one by one, you pick a topic from the bowl at random and talk about it for one to two minutes.

The advantage of doing it this way is that you practice talking about a topic you are not familiar with, and you have to talk in front of other people. It’s more difficult than it sounds!

Getting started

If you find the exercise above a bit frightening, don’t worry! Here is a simple way of getting started. Try out a simulation of IELTS Speaking Part 2

Here is the task:

IELTS Speaking tips

Here are some tips on how to approach this.

1. Don’t waste too much time choosing the most appropriate friend. It can be anyone that you can talk about.
2. You don’t have to tell the truth! The purpose of this exercise is not to convey information about your friend; it is to demonstrate that you can speak English.
3. Use your preparation time wisely. This means writing a plan of things to say. The task card itself will give you broad ideas: where you met, what he/she is like, what is so special about him/her. Just build on these!