Describe an achievement you are proud of
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe an achievement 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.
Pride is an awkward register in English for a lot of speakers. Claim too much and it sounds unearned, play it down and the closing line of the card, why you are proud of it, gets a shrug instead of an answer. The version that works is usually plain and specific: this was hard for me, and here is why. The achievement itself need not be large. Clearing a backlog paper, running further than you could before, getting a first job, teaching a younger sibling to read. What makes one usable is being able to say how you did it, which quietly rules out things that merely happened to you. Who helped you is the line most often given a single sentence, and out with it go the tutor who stayed back, the parent who paid for the course, the friend who kept asking.
Angles worth taking
- Choose something you worked at over weeks, because the method is what fills the middle of this answer.
- Break how you did it into stages: what you changed, what you gave up, what you repeated until it worked.
- Name at least two people who helped and what each one actually did, since the card asks for them.
- Explain why it mattered to you in particular, rather than why achievements matter to people in general.
- Say how close you came to not managing it, because the near miss is what makes pride sound earned.
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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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