Interpreting the IELTS Speaking Grading Criteria

IELTS Speaking Grading Criteria

The criteria for IELTS Speaking is available on the official IELTS website, but it's not really user-friendly. They use a lot of jargon, and complex language in the official document which makes it somewhat difficult to interpret as a teacher, let alone a student.

Your speaking test is scored from 1-9 based on four key criteria.

1. Fluency and Coherence

Fluency is the ability to maintain a natural flow of speech without noticeable effort. Frequent self-correction, hesitation, pausing or repetition are all common mistakes a student with poor fluency would make.

Coherency is what makes your answer understandable. In order to score highly you need to indicate a willingness to extend and develop your answer, use linking words and discourse markers, avoid long pauses and restarts.

2. Vocabulary

Vocabulary is definitely one of the most important criteria, no doubt about that.

You should use advanced level words as well as collocations. Be sure to use the correct word endings, singular or plural and verb ending for the correct tense. Paraphrasing and focusing on colloquial language will set your answers apart. Lastly, the importance of using the correct vocabulary depending on the context to explain or describe something can't be stressed enough.

3. Grammar

About 25% of your marks come from using error free grammar structures. However, when learning a new language people often make grammatical errors. The bad news is, if more than 50% of your sentences have any errors in them, you will not get more than band 6 for grammatical range and accuracy. So to score 7 or higher, you should try to construct error free sentences for more than half of your answer.

Use a wide variety of grammatical structures like simple, compound, complex sentences and obviously try to limit grammatical errors. Common mistakes students make are mistakes with articles, prepositions and sentence order.

Please note that numerous grammatical errors influence your fluency and coherence.

4. Pronunciation

It's not really a big deal if you don't have a native English accent despite what you might think, However if your accent makes it difficult to comprehend what you're saying, you'll struggle to get a high score. Language features such as intonation, word stress, and vocal expression are without a doubt a very important part of pronunciation.

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