IELTS Speaking Band Descriptors: an Introduction

IELTS Speaking Band Descriptors: An Introduction

What is IELTS?

If you’ve never heard of IELTS, you’ll probably come across it sooner or later – it’s the world’s most popular English proficiency test, with over 2 million test-takers per year. IELTS is the International English Language Testing System administered by University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations. It is used primarily by students wishing to gain entry onto university courses in English speaking countries, just like the TOEFL. Although IELTS is a British test, it is accepted by most American institutions as well as the majority of universities around the world.

The test is divided into four parts – Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. Candidates are assigned a ‘band’ score for each section from 0-9. The average of these bands gives the students’ overall score as a whole or half band (e.g. 6.0 or 6.5).

While the grading for Reading and Listening are straight forward, the Writing and Speaking sections use grading criteria. Understanding these is essential to teaching IELTS effectively. This article will give a brief introduction to the IELTS speaking band descriptors.

What do my students want?

“How can I get a 7 in IELTS speaking?” This is a question I am often asked by students, and when I first started teaching IELTS many years ago I didn’t really know how to answer the question. ‘Improve your English,” or “Practise more” is the advice I used to give. This was because at that time, it was a mystery to me how the test was graded. However, once I had discovered and got to grips with the IELTS speaking band descriptors, it became much easier for me to create lessons focused very specifically on how to get a required grade in the test. You just have to know what Cambridge is looking for.

Where do I start?

Before you look at IELTS speaking band descriptors, you need to ask the question, “What IELTS speaking score do my students need?” This may seem like an obvious thing to do, but it is often overlooked by teachers in IELTS classes, especially if you have students with different backgrounds, levels and goals. However, this simple question should be the starting point for any IELTS course.

Without this knowledge, you cannot give the students the strategies and advice they need to obtain their required score. Typically, a student going on an undergraduate exchange programme may require a 6.0 overall. For post-graduate courses this will most likely be 6.5 or 7.0, and for the top universities, 7.5 overall. Some universities will ask for an overall grade but also stipulate what the student should get in speaking and/or writing.

But once you know the target score, then what?

Understanding the IELTS Speaking Band Descriptors

Once you know what score your students need, it is vital that you fully understand the IELTS Speaking Criteria used for assessing the speaking test. The publicly available version of the grading criteria, which has slightly less detail but very similar to the one real IELTS examiners use, can be found here.

This document can look a little confusing at first glance, so here is an overview of what the four IELTS band descriptors are:

Fluency and Coherence – this measures the student’s ability to express ideas and opinions clearly, logically, and without hesitation. Students should link ideas together using appropriate language (discourse markers) and topics should develop fully and naturally.

Lexical Resource – this looks at the range of words and phrases the student can use to talk about a range of topics, and how accurate their use of lexis is. Students should use less common vocabulary and idiomatic expressions, and be able to paraphrase effectively to get higher grades.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy – this assesses the student’s use of a variety of simple and complex grammatical structures and how accurately they employ them.

Pronunciation – this takes into account all features of pronunciation from the production of individual sounds and words to sentence-level stress, rhythm and linking, to using intonation for expressing feelings.

To give the student an overall grade for speaking, the examiner will assign a band score for each of the IELTS band descriptors. The overall grade is an average of the four scores, rounded down to the nearest half band. So for example, if the student gets 7, 7, 7, 6 – an average of 6.75 – the overall score will be 6.5.

Understanding the student’s current level

It is also crucial that you understand where the student is now as well as where they need to get to. Unless you know the starting point, you cannot give the right advice to progress. Let’s look at a real example from an IELTS examiner training video of a student who received a 6.0 for speaking, which you can watch in full here (extract below from 00:44 – 1:16):

Question: Tell me about your hometown. What do you like most about your hometown?

Response: “So, I live in Cascais. It’s er, a little town near Lisbon, around about, er, 25 kilometres. And it’s, er, on the coast, so I have a lot of, we have there a lot of beaches, and the weather is pretty warm in the, um, in the summer and it’s not that cold in the winter, so we have a pretty good weather.”

Why is it a 6.0 and how could she improve her score?

Fluency and Coherence:

Why it’s a 6.0.

She speaks quite naturally and confidently, but with some self-correction and hesitations. Linking of ideas is basic but adequate for the question.

How to improve it.

The answer is a little short, so she needs to develop the topic a bit more, and try to reduce the number of hesitations.

Lexical Resource:

Why it’s a 6.0.

She can express herself adequately to talk about the topic with some colloquialisms (e.g. pretty warm).

How to improve it

The range is a little limited – she repeats the words weather and pretty. The vocabulary she uses is quite simple and common, so she could try to use some less common words.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy:

Why it’s a 6.0.

She uses basic grammar, but good enough to communicate her ideas clearly.

How to improve it

She requires a wider range of more complex grammatical structures. Also, she makes too many mistakes to score a 7.

Pronunciation:

Why it’s a 6.0

We can generally understand it despite some pronunciation issues.

How to improve IELTS speaking test 

Actually, this is close to scoring a 7, but she loses rhythm through lapses in stress timing, and has some problems with certain phonemes (e.g. the th sound in weather)

So here’s how she could produce an example that would score at least a 7.0

“So, I live in Cascais, which is a really small town around about 25 kilometres from Lisbon, so it’s not too far away from the capital. The town is right on the coast, which means we’ve got loads of gorgeous beaches. But I guess the thing I like most about my hometown is the weather. It’s pretty warm in the summer and it’s also not that cold in the winter, so we’re extremely lucky to have such a fantastic climate. I’ve been living there since I was a child, and I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

Why is this a 7.0?

Fluency and Coherence:

As you can see, this is a much fuller answer. She develops the topic fully and answers the question – what do you like most? The structure is logical and coherent, and there are no hesitations.

Lexical Resource:

This response uses more precise descriptions (really small, right on the coast) which are crucial to getting a higher score. Also, she uses less common lexical items, such as loads of, gorgeous, extremely, and she uses synonyms to prevent repetition (e.g. weather – climate).

Grammatical Range and Accuracy:

There are more complex sentences in this response using subordinate clauses (which means…) and different tenses (I’ve been living…), and there are no mistakes.
Pronunciation – of course, we can’t hear the response above, but if she can improve her rhythm and stress timing, she would score a 7.

How do I put this into practice in the classroom?

Unfortunately, there isn’t space in this article to go into details with teaching tips. But look out for upcoming articles where I will fully explain each of the IELTS Speaking  Band Descriptors and give some insights into how to teach each one.