Describe a film or television programme that made an impression on you
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a film or television programme that made an impression on you. 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.
Most of what makes a film stay with you sits outside the film. You were fifteen. You watched it on a laptop at two in the morning during exam week, or in a cinema with your father, or on television every year at the same festival until you knew the lines before they arrived. The card gives you a bullet for when you watched it, and that is usually where the impression was actually made. What it was about deserves enough detail for someone who has not seen it to follow you, and no more than that. Then the last bullet asks what changed: what you went on thinking about afterwards, and how long that afterwards lasted.
Angles worth taking
- Say what you expected before watching; an impression lives in the gap between that and what arrived.
- One scene, described so the examiner can picture it, outperforms a summary of the whole plot.
- Discomfort counts — something that annoyed or disturbed you made an impression just as reliably.
- Give a thought to who it would not suit; the recommendation question lands the moment you stop talking.
- Subtitles, dubbing, the language you watched in — all of that is usable detail about the experience.
Ready to speak?
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Browse all IELTS Speaking testsThe format
Parts covered
2
Prompts in total
3
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.
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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