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 communicated with someone without sharing a language.
You should say:
- who the person was and how you met them
- where and when this happened
- what you were trying to say to each other
- how you actually managed to get your meaning across
and explain how it felt to communicate this way, and whether it changed how you think about language.
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
- Which of those methods works best, in your experience?
- Does it depend on what they're trying to communicate?
Examiner follow-ups
- What does a learner get that an app user doesn't?
- Would your answer be different for someone learning purely for business?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you think of an example where a gesture caused a misunderstanding?
- Are facial expressions more universal than hand gestures?
Examiner follow-ups
- Why is humour so often mentioned here?
- Does that mean some ideas simply can't cross languages?
Examiner follow-ups
- Does it give native English speakers an unfair advantage?
- Is there any realistic alternative?
Examiner follow-ups
- What exactly is lost when a language goes?
- Is it different if the community itself chooses to switch languages?
Examiner follow-ups
- What can a government realistically do?
- Can a language survive on school lessons alone?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you think of anything in your own language that supports or undermines that idea?
- What would it mean for bilingual people if it were true?
Examiner follow-ups
- On balance, would you take that trade?
- Would cultures stay distinct without their own languages?
Examiner follow-ups
- How might that change what schools teach?
- Is something lost when a machine sits between two speakers?
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
- Tells the Part 2 story in sequence — the situation, the attempt, the breakthrough — without stalling to search for language vocabulary.
- Buys thinking time naturally in Part 3 ("That's a big question — my instinct is…") instead of falling silent before abstract questions about translation and identity.
- Moves comfortably between anecdote and analysis: a story about miming in a market can feed straight into a point about gesture being universal.
- Extends answers unprompted — the endangered-languages question should produce a position plus a reason, not a single sentence.
- Doesn't restart sentences repeatedly when discussing abstract ideas like linguistic identity; one self-correction and on.
Lexical Resource
- Topic vocabulary used precisely: mother tongue, lingua franca, get the gist, mime, paraphrase, bilingual, dialect, untranslatable.
- Natural collocations — "language barrier", "broken English", "get my point across", "pick up a language" — rather than invented pairings.
- Can talk about communication without the word 'communicate' in every sentence: convey, get across, make yourself understood, signal.
- One well-placed idiom ("we were talking with our hands") beats a string of forced ones.
- Handles the abstract register of later Part 3 questions — dominance, extinction, identity, nuance — without slipping back into simple vocabulary.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Past narrative under control in Part 2, including past continuous for setting ("I was trying to buy a train ticket when…") and past perfect for background.
- Unreal conditionals for the one-world-language question: "If everyone spoke the same language, we would probably lose…".
- Concession structures for balanced Part 3 answers: "Even though apps are impressive, they still…", "Granted, English opens doors, but…".
- Passives where the topic invites them: "languages are being lost", "meaning gets distorted in translation".
- Errors are occasional, minor and quickly self-corrected; complex sentences don't collapse halfway through.
Pronunciation
- Intelligible throughout — accent is irrelevant, but word endings on plurals (languages, gestures, cultures) must not vanish.
- Contrastive stress carries the argument: "an app translates the words, not the meaning."
- The Part 2 story has lively, varied intonation; flat delivery makes even a good story sound memorised.
- Connected speech is natural ("sort_of", "couldn't_understand_a_word") rather than word-by-word.
- Multi-syllable topic words — interpreter, indigenous, communication, particularly — stressed on the correct syllable.
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Opening / context — one or two sentences placing the encounter: who the person was, where you were, and why no shared language existed.
- The problem — what you needed to say and why it mattered right then; urgency or stakes give the story a spine.
- The attempts — walk through what you actually tried: gestures, drawing, single words, a phone. Sequencing language ("first… when that failed…") shows control.
- The breakthrough moment — the exact point understanding landed; one concrete detail ("she suddenly laughed and pointed at the bus behind me") lifts the whole story.
- Feelings then and after — frustration, comedy, relief; name the emotion and let one sentence show it rather than just labelling it.
- Concluding reflection — answer the explain line head-on: what the experience taught you about how much of communication sits outside words, and whether that lesson stuck.
“Translation apps are getting better every year. Is it still worth spending years learning a foreign language?”
- Answer: commit clearly — yes, it's worth it, but the reason for learning has changed.
- Explain: the mechanism — an app handles transactions, but a language rewires how you relate to people; you can't build friendship or trust through a phone held between two faces.
- Example: one concrete case — a traveller can order dinner with an app, but a manager working abroad who learns the local language gets invited to the conversations that happen after the meeting ends.
- Alternative view: concede genuinely — for a one-week holiday or a single business deal, spending three years on grammar makes little sense; the app really is the rational choice there.
- Evaluate: land the judgement — so the app replaces language as a tool, but not language as a relationship; the deeper your purpose, the worse the substitute.
Common mistakes for this specific test
The cue card is about how you communicated, not where you went. Candidates spend ninety seconds describing the holiday and ten on the actual exchange — leaving the heart of the card, how you got meaning across, almost untouched.
The fourth bullet — how you managed to make yourself understood — is where the marks live. "Somehow we understood each other" is an empty claim; miming a steering wheel, drawing a clock face, showing a photo are the details that prove the story.
"Do you still write by hand?" answered with "No, never" kills the exchange. Two to four sentences with a because — what replaced it, what you miss or don't — is the natural length.
The translation-app and machine-conversation questions tempt candidates into a prepared speech about technology in general. These questions are about language specifically — what apps can and can't carry — and a generic answer is off-target.
Inflating your language count invites a follow-up you can't survive. "I understand a little Tamil from my grandmother but I can't really speak it" is honest, specific, and shows better vocabulary than a false claim.
The topic invites it. Vary the language: we couldn't understand a word, meaning got lost, we had no common tongue, the words wouldn't come.
Your market-stall miming story belongs in Part 2. Part 3 asks about societies — endangered languages, English dominance — and Band 8–9 answers generalise ('minority communities', 'in most international workplaces') with the personal case as brief illustration.
"Does it matter if small languages disappear?" needs a stance. "It's sad but it's natural" and "every language is priceless" are both defensible — what fails is refusing to choose and listing both sides without a verdict.
It's a hypothetical, and it's testing conditionals. Candidates who answer "that will never happen" in the present tense miss a free chance to show 'would', 'would have to' and 'might lose' under pressure.
The later questions about identity and machine translation push nervous candidates into a sprint, and pronunciation features collapse first. A measured pace with clear stress reads as thoughtfulness, not hesitation.