How to practise IELTS Speaking when you have nobody to speak to
No partner, no tutor, no problem: a solo speaking protocol with a self-marking rubric built from the public band descriptors.
Question typesSpeakingUpdated 6 min read
A real person to talk to is what many candidates preparing alone say they want most, and many of them will never get one. That is less of a disaster than it feels, because the thing a partner gives you is not conversation — it is a clock, a question you have not seen, and a verdict. All three can be supplied without another human, and solo practice that is recorded, timed and marked against the descriptors beats an hour of friendly chat that never once tells you your word choice was vague. Unrecorded practice is the actual problem, not unpartnered practice: you cannot hear your own mid-phrase pauses while you are busy producing them.
The three things you have to replace
A tutor supplies pressure, novelty and judgement. Your substitutes are a timer on the table, a question bank you wrote weeks ago and now draw from blind, and a playback pass with a rubric in front of you. Write thirty Part 1 questions and twenty Part 2 cue cards in one sitting on a Sunday, number them, and never choose which one to answer — roll a die, use the last digit of a clock. Choosing your own question is how candidates spend six weeks getting excellent at the four topics they like.
The weekly protocol
Three sessions, about a quarter of an hour of recorded speech a week and under an hour of desk time once playback and marking are counted, each session shaped like the real part it trains. The test itself runs 11 to 14 minutes across Part 1 (4 to 5 minutes of familiar questions), Part 2 (one minute to prepare, up to two minutes to speak) and Part 3 (a 4 to 5 minute discussion of abstract ideas), so nothing here should feel long.
- Monday: Part 1 rapid-fire. Twelve drawn questions, 30 seconds each, one continuous recording, no stopping and no restarting. Target two or three sentences per answer: the answer, then a reason or an example. The purpose is not brilliance, it is eliminating the dead half-second before every reply and the reflex of answering "yes, I do" and stopping.
- Wednesday: Part 2 with the one-minute map. Draw a cue card, set sixty seconds, and write a map, never sentences: the same four beats in shorthand — Set (who or what, when, where), Detail, Event, Feeling and now — plus three words you intend to use. The long version of that minute, beat by beat, is in what to do with the one minute of preparation. Then record for a strict two minutes. If you dry up at 1:20, keep speaking anyway — invent a detail, compare it to something, say what you would change. The examiner stops you at two minutes, and being stopped is the intended outcome; stopping unprompted at ninety seconds leaves the long turn under length, which is a common Part 2 failure and a cap on your fluency mark. The only cure is practising the last thirty seconds.
- Friday: Part 3 with an abstraction ladder. Take Wednesday's topic and climb it in three rungs of 90 seconds: your own experience, then what is generally true in your country, then causes and consequences or a hypothetical future. Record all three back to back with no break. Part 3 asks you to discuss more abstract issues rather than your own life, and the ladder trains exactly that move; how to extend Part 3 answers without rambling gives a four-move frame to use on every rung.
Marking yourself: one row per criterion
Speaking is assessed on four criteria, one band each: fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. Vague self-criticism ("that was bad") is useless because it maps onto none of them. Score each recording on this rubric instead, counting an observable rather than guessing a band.
| Criterion | What you listen for | How you count it | Next session's fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fluency and coherence | Pauses in the middle of a phrase, and restarts of a sentence you had already begun | Tally them; divide by minutes spoken. Mid-phrase pauses are the ones that cost you, not pauses between ideas | Slow the whole answer by ten per cent and finish every sentence you start, even badly |
| Lexical resource | Precision of word choice: every "thing", "stuff", "very good", "a lot of" where an exact word existed | Count the vague slots. Write the precise word you should have used beside each | Pre-load six topic-specific words on Sunday and use them on purpose this week |
| Grammatical range and accuracy | Range of structures attempted, and how many clauses came out error-free | Two numbers: distinct structures used (conditional, relative clause, past perfect, passive) and error-free clauses out of total | Attempt one structure you avoided last time, in a planned sentence, in Part 2 |
| Pronunciation | Words the listener had to guess | Replay and mark every word you could not identify without already knowing what you said | Drill those specific words, plus the stressed syllable in each, for five minutes |
Keep the four numbers in a single note, dated. Progress on this rubric is a direction, not a target: mid-phrase pauses per minute falling, vague slots falling, error-free clauses rising — not a band prediction. Be honest about the pace: gaining half a band takes something in the region of 200 to 240 hours of instruction with feedback on average, and it slows down above band 6, so the sensible question is whether this week's recording is cleaner than last week's, not whether you are "at" 7 yet. If you want a check on your own verdicts, the paid plans include AI grading of your speaking against the same four criteria.
If you can get a human occasionally, use them for the one thing recordings cannot give you: unpredictability in Part 3, where somebody pushes back on your opinion. Everything else on this list — the clock, the unseen question, the ruthless verdict — you can run alone, this week, starting tonight.