Find out what English-language skills IELTS examiners look for in your Speaking test, how your Speaking band scores are calculated and more.
The IELTS Speaking test assesses your ability to communicate in English. The examiner awards band scores for your spoken English-language skills. The Speaking test will take place in a face-to-face interview with a qualified IELTS examiner in a quiet room.
IELTS 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 Speaking test.
Examiners assess your performance against 4 criteria. Fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. Your 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.
Comparing speaking performances across bands 5 to 8Find out how speaking performances vary across bands 5 to 8 in the IELTS Speaking test.
