Speaking Part 1: Interview: Question 3

Worked solution

Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response

Fluency & Coherence

Each answer is built as a small, complete thought rather than a fact plus silence: a claim is made and then immediately supported with a personal detail or consequence (e.g. question 5 moves from “they give you balance” to the concrete alternative of “scrolling on my phone”). Natural hesitation-fillers and organisers (“actually”, “to be honest”, “I suppose”, “if I’m honest”) keep the delivery sounding spontaneous rather than read aloud.

Lexical Resource

Vocabulary is specific rather than generic: “watercolours”, “a peaceful, personal thing”, “squeeze painting in”, “scrolling on my phone” are all precise, natural word choices tied to this exact hobby rather than phrases that could be swapped into any Part 1 answer. No single adjective is recycled across all five answers to describe different aspects of the hobby.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

The answers control a good range of forms: used to + infinitive for a past habit (“my aunt used to paint”), past continuous/narrative past for the memory of getting started (“I’d just sit and watch her”), and a second-conditional-style speculation in the final answer (“I reckon I’d just end up scrolling”). All forms are used accurately and appropriately for what each question asks.

Pronunciation, the fourth Speaking criterion, cannot be assessed from a written transcript. It is scored only in a live or recorded response.

Common pitfalls specific to this task

See commonMistakes above. At foundation level the single biggest risk on this topic is a one-word answer to question 1 (“Painting.”) followed by silence. The examiner then has almost nothing to work with, and the rest of the set can only recover so much of the Fluency & Coherence score.