English — Exams
A quarter of an IELTS band is pronunciation, and you cannot rehearse pronunciation in your head.
Rehearse the speaking parts of IELTS, TOEFL iBT, C1 Advanced, PTE Academic and OET out loud — the long turn, the paired discussion, the microphone task, the clinical role play — with a partner that keeps the clock running and pushes when an answer runs thin. A score and the corrections follow in writing.
IELTS wants a monologue, Cambridge wants a negotiation, PTE wants a recording.
IELTS Part 2, the long turn
A card, one minute to make notes, then one to two minutes on your own while the examiner says nothing. Running dry at ninety seconds is easy, and it is the silence rather than the subject that does it.
TOEFL's repeat and interview tasks
The revised speaking section plays you sentences to repeat exactly, then runs a simulated interview on academic and campus topics. There is no essay-style planning left in it — you answer, immediately, and your rhythm is being measured.
The C1 Advanced paired task
Cambridge sits you with another candidate and gives you both a question with written prompts to discuss and settle. Interactive communication is assessed in its own right, so bringing the other person in, disagreeing and reaching a decision counts alongside your grammar.
PTE, scored by machine
Six task types and not one of them has a listener: reading a paragraph aloud, repeating a sentence heard once, retelling a lecture from your own notes. Oral fluency and pronunciation are scored as separate things, which changes what a hesitation costs you.
OET clinical role plays
Two role plays of about five minutes, in your own profession, with an interlocutor playing the patient or the relative. The scenarios are written with friction in them, because that is what the ward is like.
Trinity GESE for a visa
The Home Office accepts a short list of secure English language tests, and Trinity's graded examinations in spoken English are among them. Some visa routes test only speaking and listening, so the interview is the whole exam.
Examiners take marks off in fairly predictable places.
The band descriptors are public documents and they are not vague. IELTS marks fluency and coherence, vocabulary, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation as four separate criteria, weighted equally, so one weak column drags the average down while the rest is fine.
- Keeping a two-minute turn going without a shopping list of sentences — you need signposting, examples and an ending.
- Going round a word that will not come: the thing you use for, what do you call it — and carrying on without a break in the rhythm.
- Range under a clock — although, whereas, the fact that — because range is marked, and a run of short sentences puts a ceiling on it.
- Where the beat lands: PHOtograph, phoTOGraphy, photoGRAPHic — the stress shifts and drags the vowels along with it.
- Answering the question that was asked, including the follow-up you did not prepare for and cannot steer back.
- Contractions and weak forms in your own mouth — I'd've rather than I would have — because unreduced English sounds recited.
Start with ten minutes
Nothing to book, and a written report at the end of the first session.
Try 10 minutes freeOur number is not their band
We do not mark for any board. The score at the end of a session is ours, and it cannot tell you the band an IELTS examiner would put on that answer or how ETS would treat it. Nor do we supply the content: for OET, the clinical vocabulary you bring yourself. What we run is the task, at the speed it is actually run at.