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 story an older person in your family told you.
You should say:
- who told you the story and when they told it
- what the story was about
- why they told it to you
- how you reacted when you heard it
and explain why this story has stayed with you, and whether you have passed it on to anyone else.
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
- Is there anything the history book does better?
- Which would you trust more on the details?
Examiner follow-ups
- Have you noticed this in your own family?
- What could prompt people to ask earlier?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is anything gained in the retelling?
- Does it matter if the facts drift, as long as the meaning survives?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can phone calls and visits do what living together used to do?
- Is this change worse for some cultures than others?
Examiner follow-ups
- Which way is your own country moving?
- Does economic change play a part?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is there a kind of knowledge that doesn't go out of date?
- How can generations stay useful to each other despite this?
Examiner follow-ups
- What's the difference between a recording of a moment and a memory of it?
- Will today's children be glad of those archives or overwhelmed by them?
Examiner follow-ups
- What exactly changes when someone knows they're being recorded?
- Is an imperfect recording still better than nothing?
Examiner follow-ups
- Where, if anywhere, does oral storytelling still thrive today?
- Could it matter in a digital age, or is this just nostalgia?
Examiner follow-ups
- Who should be responsible for preserving ordinary people's records?
- Would you want your own descendants to see everything you've posted?
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
- Retells someone else's story in Part 2 without losing the thread — story-within-a-story structure is the specific fluency challenge of this card.
- Signals the layers clearly ("the way my grandmother told it…", "apparently…", "and this is the part I still find hard to believe") so the listener always knows whose voice we're in.
- Moves between the past of the story, the moment of telling, and the present reflection without tense-driven stumbles breaking the flow.
- In Part 3, builds comparisons (oral vs. written, recorded vs. remembered) in organised steps rather than bouncing between sides.
- Uses natural fillers of thought ("how do I put this…") instead of silence when the abstract memory questions bite.
Lexical Resource
- Storytelling and memory vocabulary: hand down, pass on, fade, vivid, exaggerate, embellish, word of mouth, keep a story alive.
- Family and generation range: ancestors, descendants, upbringing, extended family, family lore, the older generation, skip a generation.
- Reported speech vocabulary varies naturally: she swore that, he used to claim, apparently, the way she told it, or so the story goes.
- Part 3 abstraction is available when needed: oral tradition, collective memory, archive, heritage, continuity, digital footprint.
- Distinguishes shades precisely: remember vs. reminisce, story vs. account, respect vs. reverence, old vs. elderly vs. elder.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Past perfect anchors the story-behind-the-story: "she was describing something that had happened forty years before I was born".
- Reported speech is controlled across tenses: "he told me they had walked for three days", "she always said she would never go back".
- used to and would paint the era the story comes from: "in her village they would fetch water before dawn".
- Comparative structures carry Part 3: "far more intimate than a textbook", "the less families live together, the fewer stories survive".
- Hedged speculation for the future questions: "much of today's data may well be unreadable", "I suspect our grandchildren will know oddly little about us".
Pronunciation
- Shifts voice subtly when quoting the older relative — a slight change of pace or pitch for reported lines lifts the whole Part 2.
- Emotive stress lands where the story turns: "they lost EVERYTHING that night — and she never once complained about it."
- Multi-syllable topic words are secure: generation, ancestors, tradition, nostalgia, inheritance — stress in the right place.
- Pace slows at the story's weightiest moment instead of rushing past it; silence used deliberately is a pronunciation feature, not a fault.
- Weak forms keep narration natural: "she_used_to tell_us", "one_of_the stories" — full-strength function words make storytelling sound robotic.
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Frame the telling first — who told you, roughly when, and the scene: a power cut, a long train ride, the kitchen after a festival meal. The setting of the telling is half this card.
- Tell the story itself in miniature — beginning, turn, ending in four or five sentences. It's their story, so 'apparently' and 'the way he told it' keep the layers clear.
- Include one line in their voice — a sentence of reported or direct speech ("she'd say: we were poor, but so was everyone, so nobody noticed") makes the person audible.
- Explain why they told it — the third bullet: a warning, a lesson, pride, or just the mood of the evening. Guessing honestly ("I think she needed someone to know") works beautifully.
- Give your reaction then and your understanding now — as a child you laughed; now you hear what it cost them. That double perspective is Band 9 material on this card.
- Close on the explain line — why it stayed with you, and whether you've passed it on; if you haven't, say who you're saving it for.
“We now have endless photos and videos of family life on our phones. Does all that recording actually help us remember?”
- Answer: commit to a side — e.g. mostly no; we've confused capturing moments with keeping them.
- Explain: give the mechanism — knowing the camera has it, the mind files the moment as saved and stops doing the work of remembering; ten thousand unsorted photos are a landfill, not an archive.
- Example: one concrete illustration — most people can retell their grandmother's story heard once by firelight, but can't say what's in last year's camera roll without scrolling.
- Alternative view: concede genuinely — a recording holds what memory cannot: her actual voice, his exact laugh; for families separated by distance or bereavement, that is beyond price.
- Evaluate: land the judgement — recording helps when it's deliberate and rare, a few treasures someone curates; it fails as a substitute for the retelling, because memory lives in repetition, not storage.
Common mistakes for this specific test
The card asks for a story they told, not a portrait of the person. Candidates spend ninety seconds on how kind their grandmother was and never actually recount anything. The examiner needs a tale with a beginning and an end.
"He told me about his village life" is a topic, not a story. Pick one incident — the flood, the wedding that nearly didn't happen, the journey with one suitcase — something that can be ruined by interruption. That's the test of whether it's a story.
This card has three time zones: when the events happened, when you were told, and now. Jumping between them without past perfect or clear markers ("years later, when she finally told me…") turns the answer into a tense salad.
The third bullet is the card's soul — stories are told for reasons: to warn, to teach, to be remembered. Candidates who skip it deliver a plot summary and miss the easiest source of depth on the whole card.
A story heard from someone else begs for 'she said', 'he swore', 'apparently'. Telling it entirely in flat third-person past wastes the exact grammar range this card was designed to elicit.
Part 3 moves from your grandmother to grandmothers in general. Questions about elders across cultures and shrinking families need 'in many societies', 'urban families tend to' — your family appears as one example, briefly.
"Old people are treasures and we must respect them" answers nothing. The question is why status differs across cultures and what happens as societies modernise — it wants causes and consequences, not greeting-card lines.
The final questions are sharper than 'phones are good for memories'. Band 8–9 candidates notice the catch: formats die, accounts get deleted, and nobody curates ten thousand photos. Engage with the doubt built into the question.
Six answers all opening with "In the past, people…" flattens your range. Vary the anchors: a couple of generations ago, before smartphones, in my grandparents' day, when extended families still lived under one roof.
Candidates sprint past the very moment that makes the story worth telling — the loss, the reunion, the punchline — as if embarrassed by it. Slowing down there is where Fluency, Pronunciation and the story itself all score together.