Describe a celebration or festival you enjoyed

Intermediate

8 min

IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a celebration or festival you enjoyed. One minute to prepare, up to two minutes to speak, then follow-up questions.

An intermediate-level session of about 8 minutes. Covers Part 2. 3 prompts in total.

Whoever is listening may not know the festival you pick, the food, the calendar, or why one day of it matters more than the rest. That is an advantage once you notice it, because explaining a Chhath morning or a college farewell to somebody who has never seen one is the kind of unhurried talk the task is built for. Answers that assume shared knowledge go flat: the occasion is named, everyone is said to be very happy, and the detail that would have made it visible never arrives. The card asks what you did, which is where one particular year beats the festival in general. A single Diwali, one wedding, one hostel Holi, told in order, gives you events to narrate. The rounding-off questions then pull towards comparison with childhood, which needs used to and these days rather than more description. Choose the year you can still see.

Angles worth taking

Describe one year's celebration rather than the festival in general, because a single day has events you can narrate.
Explain the occasion as if to somebody who has never attended, including what the day is actually for.
Order what you did across the day, from the morning preparations to the food to the evening.
Say who was there by relationship rather than just family, and what each of them did differently from you.
Give the enjoyment a cause: the crowd, the music, a cousin who visits once a year, days away from study.
Name the part that is not enjoyable, whether the cleaning, the travelling or the relatives you avoid.

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The format

Parts covered

Prompts in total

Modes

Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)

How a IELTS Speaking session works

Part 1 — the warm-up

Familiar questions about you: work, home, routines. Short answers, but not one-word ones. The examiner is calibrating to your voice.

Part 2 — the cue card

A topic card with prompts, one minute of prep with notes, then up to two minutes speaking without interruption.

Part 3 — the discussion

Abstract follow-ups on the Part 2 theme. Opinions, comparisons and speculation, where the higher bands are decided.

Your band estimate

A score on each of the four official criteria, what pulled it down, and the habit to change before you sit the real test.

What you're scored on

IELTS Speaking is marked on four criteria of equal weight. The estimate reports each one separately, because they rarely move together.

Your objective

Speak for 1-2 minutes with clear structure and descriptive language.

Fluency and coherence

Whether you keep going, and whether the ideas connect. Hesitation while you search for a word costs less than hesitation while you search for a thought.

Lexical resource

Range and precision, including whether you can paraphrase around a word you do not have instead of stopping at it.

Grammatical range and accuracy

Variety of structures as well as correctness. All-simple-sentences and all-accurate caps out around band 6.

Pronunciation

Intelligibility, stress and intonation. Accent is not penalised; flat stress and swallowed word endings are.

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