When you are preparing for the IELTS Speaking test, it’s really important to improve your fluency. But what is fluency? Fluency is the ability to ‘keep going’, to produce continuous speech and not have to stop or pause a lot. Fluency is also one of the marking criteria in the IELTS Speaking test, which is why you should spend time practising it before your test. Before you start, however, you must remember that building up fluency takes time and the sooner you begin, the better.

Getting started

A good way to kick-start your practice is by making use of practice tests. For example, here is a simulation of IELTS Speaking Part 2:

Here are some tips on how to approach this:

1. Don’t waste too much time choosing the most appropriate friend. It can be anyone that you can talk about.
2. You don’t have to tell the truth! The purpose of this exercise is not to convey information about your friend; it is to demonstrate that you can speak English.
3. Use your preparation time wisely. This means writing a plan of things to say. The task card itself will give you broad ideas: where you met, what he/she is like, what is so special about him/her. Just build on these!

A simple exercise

Once you have gone through the Road to IELTS practice tests, you might want to try something more challenging. Join with a few friends to practise for Part 2 of the IELTS Speaking test. Each person writes a topic on a piece of paper, folds it up and puts it in a bowl. Topics might be: a friend, a book, an advertisement, a building or a TV show. Then, one-by-one, you pick a topic from the bowl at random and talk about it for one to two minutes.

This exercise will help you practise talking about a topic you are not familiar with, and you have to talk in front of other people – exactly as you will in the IELTS test. The important thing is to keep practising. Remember, even good speakers make mistakes!