IELTS Speaking Part 2: how to fill the full two minutes

Part 2 is the round candidates dread. The examiner hands you a card, gives you one minute with a pencil and paper, and then you speak alone for up to two minutes with no help and no interruption. Most people either dry up at forty seconds or talk fast and say nothing.

The good news is that Part 2 is the most preparable part of the whole test, because the format never changes and the skill it rewards is structural, not linguistic.

What is actually being scored

Your Speaking band comes from four equally weighted criteria across the whole test: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation.

The thing worth internalising is that accuracy is one quarter of the picture. Candidates hold back, self-correct constantly and produce short, careful turns — and score lower than someone who spoke for the full two minutes and made mistakes. A short turn simply gives the examiner too little language to award marks on.

How to use the one-minute preparation

This minute is where the round is won, and almost everyone wastes it in the same two ways: choosing what to talk about for forty seconds, or writing full sentences they then read aloud in a flat, unnatural voice.

Do this instead:

1. Ten seconds: pick your example and commit. The first workable idea is the right one. There is no better answer waiting.
2. Forty seconds: write eight to twelve concrete nouns spread across the bullets — a person's name, a place, a year, an object, a number, an emotion.
3. Ten seconds: decide your last sentence. Knowing where you're landing stops you trailing off.

Nouns work because you cannot read a sentence aloud without sounding like you're reading, but a single word like “Kanpur” or “monsoon” or “₹4,000” reliably unlocks two or three natural sentences when your eye lands on it.

A structure for the two minutes

Roughly: fifteen seconds framing, thirty seconds on the concrete setup, forty-five seconds on the detail, and thirty seconds on reflection.

Open by restating the task in your own words. It buys you five seconds of thinking time and it sounds composed:

“I'd like to talk about a journey I remember well — it was a train trip I took with my grandmother in 2019, and it's stayed with me for reasons that surprised me at the time.”

Then work through the bullets, but deliberately unevenly. The first three are usually factual — who, where, what. The fourth is almost always the reflective one: why it mattered, how you felt, what you'd change. That last bullet is where the good language lives, so give it the most time.

What to do when you run out at ninety seconds

It will happen. Have three escape hatches ready and practised, so reaching for one is automatic rather than panicked.

• Contrast it. “It's quite different from how I'd travel now, because…” — comparison generates language endlessly.
• Add a second person. “My grandmother saw it completely differently…” — another perspective is another thirty seconds.
• Project forward. “If I did it again, I'd probably…” — moves you into conditional forms, which also helps your grammar score.

Notice that each of those pushes you into a different tense or structure. That is not accidental — Grammatical Range is scored on range, so an escape hatch that changes tense earns marks while it buys time.

Landing the answer

Finish deliberately. One clear sentence — “So that's the journey I remember most, mainly because of what it taught me about patience” — tells the examiner you finished rather than failed. It's a small thing that noticeably changes the impression of control.

How to practise this properly

Reading about Part 2 does nothing for your band. The only practice that moves the number is: a card you haven't seen, a real one-minute timer, two minutes of unbroken speech, and a recording you actually listen back to.

Listening back is the uncomfortable part and the part that works. You will hear the fillers, the three-second pauses, the sentence you started twice, and the word you've been mispronouncing for years. None of that is visible from the inside while you're speaking.