Describe a skill you learnt outside school or college
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a skill you learnt outside school or college. 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.
There was no exam at the end of this one. A skill picked up outside a classroom has no syllabus and no fixed finishing point, which is why the card leans on how long it took and how you use it now. How long it took is the line most often answered in a breath and dropped. Stretched into stages it carries a great deal: the first weeks when nothing worked, the point at which it suddenly did, the part you still cannot do well. And because the closing line sits in the present tense, the answer should end up inside your current life. Driving, cooking for yourself in a new city, editing video, a language picked up from neighbours: the narrower the skill, the easier this becomes, because the learning then has a person or a screen or a stack of failed attempts in it.
Angles worth taking
- Pick a skill with a result you can point at, then begin from the first attempt that went badly.
- Name who or what taught you: a cousin, an instructor, a phone full of tutorials, plain repetition.
- Turn how long it took into stages rather than a single number of weeks or months.
- Admit what is still difficult, because a skill described as effortless leaves you nothing further to say.
- End in the present with one use from this week, since the card asks how you use it now.
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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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