In this tutorial, Ellen deciphers the language of the public band descriptors for the Speaking test. She covers bands 6, 7 and 9 so that IELTS test takers can understand what is needed at each of these bands and prepare accordingly.

You will learn:

* The four criteria you are scored on

* What it means to be a band 9 speaker and what kinds of errors even native speakers make

* How different a 7 is from a 6

* What errors you have to watch out for, and

* What resources you can use to improve your speaking score

You can download or listen to the audio version here:

|Direct Download Here | Stitcher | iTunes | Spotify | Soundcloud | Transcript |

You can also watch the full tutorial here:

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Ben: Hello there IELTS students. Welcome to IELTS podcast. You no longer have to worry, fret or panic about IELTS because we are here to guide you through this test jungle. Enjoy these IELTS tutorials and if you need more help or want to access the famous online course, you can visit us at ieltspodcast.com

Ellen: Hi there IELTS test takers. This is Ellen and I’m back with another podcast today. This one will deal with speaking. What I have done is I have pulled up the band descriptors for speaking and the goal to this podcast is to kind of clarify for you what is graded and how you are scored in your speaking test.

What we have here in front of us is clearly the public version as it says here in parenthesis, but I’ve spoken to a number of IELTS examiners and they assure me that what we have available as the public is really very similar to what the actual IELTS examiners have the day of the exam in front of them. Maybe theirs has one more bullet or it’s a little more detailed in certain areas, but on the whole, we can use this and gauge where we are in speaking.

So, this is what I want to cover today. Many of you may have seen this before, but I’m also pretty sure that a lot of you haven’t seen this. These are available all throughout the internet. All you really have to do is just type in your favorite search engine ‘IELTS speaking band descriptors’ and you’ll find them.

Also, you can easily find the writing band descriptors for Task 1 and for Task 2. That’s just for your future reference if you want to see them on your own you can look them up. It’s really easy to find them.

Let’s talk about what we have. We all pretty much know that there are nine bands. You can ignore band 0, but essentially it’s bands 1 through 9 and of course, there are four criteria that we are graded on: fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation.