Describe a member of your family you are proud of
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a member of your family you are proud of. 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.
Look at what the examiner asks once the two minutes are over: does this person know how you feel, and is pride something your family talks about. Both questions assume the answer was personal, and both are awkward after a delivered curriculum vitae of degrees, promotions and the house they built. Pride and achievement pull apart here, and the card leaves plenty of room for somebody who did something small under difficult conditions. The third bullet, how other people see them, is the one that pushes the answer out of the house and into the neighbourhood or the workplace, where you can borrow other people’s words — what relatives repeat about them, what colleagues said on the day they retired. That outside view is also what keeps the turn moving once the personal material thins out.
Angles worth taking
- Choose the relative whose story you can tell without checking facts, not the one with the best titles.
- Use other voices for the third bullet: what neighbours say about them, what colleagues said when they left.
- One difficulty they worked against gives pride a reason; unbroken success is harder to talk about.
- Whether you have ever told them how you feel is asked outright afterwards, so settle that in advance.
- Family vocabulary repeats easily, so vary how you refer to them across the two minutes.
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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.
More IELTS Speaking tests
All IELTS Speaking tests · People tests · All speaking practice