Part 1 — Introduction and interview (4–5 minutes)
Answer each question aloud in 2–4 natural sentences. Press 🔊 to hear the examiner ask it. Don't script — react.
Part 2 — Individual long turn (3–4 minutes)
You have one minute to prepare (make notes!) and should then speak for one to two minutes. Use the timers — the discipline is the practice.
Describe a time you taught something to another person.
You should say:
- who you taught and what you taught them
- why you were the one teaching them
- how you went about explaining it
- what difficulties came up while you were teaching
and explain how you felt about the experience, and whether the person actually learned it in the end.
You will have one minute to prepare and should speak for one to two minutes.
Part 3 — Two-way discussion (4–5 minutes)
These get harder as they go. Build answers with: Answer → Explain → Example → Alternative view → Evaluation. Open the follow-ups only after you've answered — that's what the examiner asks when an answer is thin.
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you think of someone who explains things brilliantly — what do they do?
- Is it mostly about the words, or something else?
Examiner follow-ups
- So is teaching a separate skill from knowing?
- Can that gap be trained away?
Examiner follow-ups
- Should schools build on that deliberately?
- Are there risks in letting students teach each other?
Examiner follow-ups
- Why would teaching deepen the teacher's own understanding?
- Does it work for every kind of knowledge?
Examiner follow-ups
- Will that advantage shrink as technology improves?
- Does it depend on the age of the learner?
Examiner follow-ups
- Why do you think that difference exists?
- Has it changed within your lifetime?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is it mainly about salary, or something deeper?
- What would actually change it?
Examiner follow-ups
- What would people gain from it?
- Who would you exempt, if anyone?
Examiner follow-ups
- What do children learn only at home?
- What happens when home and school teach conflicting things?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is that a better use of a teacher than delivering content?
- Would you have wanted that kind of schooling yourself?
What a Band 8–9 performance should demonstrate
Judge your recording against the four official criteria. An accent is not required — clarity is.
Fluency & Coherence
- The Part 2 teaching story holds its sequence — what was taught, the method, the difficulty, the outcome — without doubling back to add forgotten pieces.
- Describes a process fluently: explaining how you taught something is itself an explanation, and the examiner hears you sequencing steps in real time.
- In Part 3, develops the society-level questions (teacher status, top graduates) past one sentence without needing the printed follow-ups.
- Repairs smoothly when a comparison gets tangled — "or maybe a better way to put it is…" — and keeps going.
- Sounds like thinking aloud, not reciting: the 'learning by teaching' question gets a considered answer, not a proverb repeated back.
Lexical Resource
- Teaching vocabulary used with precision: break something down, walk someone through it, pick it up, sink in, hands-on, learn by doing.
- Distinguishes teach, explain, demonstrate, coach and train — five different acts this test invites you to confuse.
- Natural collocations: "grasp the concept", "lose patience", "a steep learning curve", "tailor the explanation to the person".
- Hobby talk in Part 1 sounds real: "I dabbled in it for a year", "I'm completely hooked", "it fell by the wayside when exams started".
- Abstract Part 3 language arrives without strain: prestige, vocation, one-size-fits-all, rote learning, mentorship.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Past narrative plus process language in Part 2: "first I showed her…, then I got her to try it herself while I watched".
- Causatives handled correctly — "I had him repeat it", "I got her to practise", "I let him make the mistake" — the natural grammar of teaching stories.
- Comparatives carry the Part 3 contrasts: "far better paid than", "nowhere near as respected as", "the younger the learner, the more that matters".
- Hypotheticals for the policy questions: "If teaching paid what engineering pays, the queue would look very different."
- Concession without collapse: "Even though a video can be replayed endlessly, it can't notice that you've stopped following."
Pronunciation
- Instruction sequences get natural list intonation — rising through the steps, falling on the last — so the process is audible, not monotone.
- Stress lands on the contrast the question sets up: "knowing something and teaching it are completely different skills."
- The word 'taught' comes out as /tɔːt/, clearly distinct from 'thought' — this cue card makes you say it constantly.
- Patience words often mispronounced — patience, thorough, encourage — are stressed on the right syllable.
- Pace drops slightly when explaining the difficult moment in the story, which reads as reflection rather than hesitation.
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Open with the pairing — who you taught, what you taught them, and the relationship, in one or two sentences: "I ended up teaching my younger cousin to ride a bicycle the summer he turned eight."
- Explain why it fell to you — the second bullet is easy to skip; a line like "his parents had tried and given up, and I was the one he didn't feel embarrassed in front of" adds real texture.
- Describe your method concretely — what you actually did first, next, and after that, so the examiner hears a process rather than a summary.
- Give the difficulty its own moment — the point where it wasn't working, what the learner felt, and what you changed; this bullet is where the story earns its interest.
- Show the turning point — the specific moment it clicked, described visually: "he was ten metres ahead before he realised I'd let go."
- Close on both halves of the explain line — how the experience felt for you, and an honest verdict on whether the learning stuck.
“Some people know a subject deeply but can't teach it at all. Why does that happen?”
- Answer: name the mechanism directly — experts forget what it was like not to know; the steps that confuse a beginner have become invisible to them.
- Explain: develop it — once knowledge becomes automatic, the expert can no longer see its parts, so they skip the exact links a novice needs and mistake speed for clarity.
- Example: ground it — a brilliant mathematician who says 'it's obvious' at the precise moment it isn't, versus a slightly older student who struggled with the same point last year and remembers where it bites.
- Alternative view: concede genuinely — some experts do teach superbly, usually because they stayed curious about their own early confusion, which suggests the gap is a habit, not a law.
- Evaluate: land it — expertise tells you what to teach, but memory of difficulty tells you how; the best teachers keep one foot in the learner's world, and that, not knowledge, is the scarce skill.
Common mistakes for this specific test
"I taught my friend to save a contact on his phone" is over in twenty seconds and offers no difficulties to describe. Pick something with stages and a struggle — swimming, cooking a dish, a grammar point — so all four bullets have material.
Candidates who taught chess explain the rules of chess to the examiner. The card wants the teaching — your method, the learner's confusion, what you changed — not a lecture on the content itself.
"He learned it very fast, no problem" throws away the best part of the story and usually leaves the candidate stranded at ninety seconds. The struggle is what makes the ending mean something; keep it in even if you have to remember hard.
"I am very good at explaining things" in Part 1, followed by a vague Part 2 with no method in it, contradicts itself. Show the skill through the story — the examiner scores what you demonstrate, not what you declare.
The video-tutorial and machine-instruction questions sit next to a well-worn memorised topic, and examiners hear the pivot instantly. These questions ask what humans still add — answer that, specifically.
"Teachers are respected less because they earn less" is one cause presented as the whole answer. Band 8–9 responses touch prestige, history, or how a society talks about the profession — then weigh which factor drives the others.
The topic hands you a family of verbs — explain, show, demonstrate, coach, guide, walk through — and using only 'teach' for two minutes flattens your Lexical Resource score on a test built to showcase it.
A classic confusion this cue card exposes: you teach someone, they learn from you. "I learned my brother to swim" is exactly the kind of repeated, noticeable error that caps Grammatical Range and Accuracy.
It's an opinion question, and "it depends on the person" with nothing after it is a non-answer. Take a side, give the gain — empathy, humility, clearer thinking — and name your exceptions if you want nuance.
Explaining your teaching method is where this Part 2 shows fluency and sequencing language — first, then, once she'd got that. Candidates who compress it to "I just showed him how" waste the card's whole design.