Speaking Part 2: Cue Card (Long Turn): Question 5
Syllabus S.part2
Describe a skill you learned.
You should say:
- what the skill is
- how you learned it
- how long it took you to learn
and explain how this skill has been useful to you.
You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes.
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response
Fluency & Coherence
The response tracks a clear timeline across all four bullets (motivation, method, a specific milestone at “around month six”, and present-day usefulness) with each stage cued by a natural time marker (“It started because…”, “by around month six…”) so the two-minute turn develops progressively rather than restating the same point, and there is no loss of pace or filler repetition anywhere in the response.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is precise for the topic (“lip-read”, “vague gesturing”, “hold a basic exchange”) and abstract reflection is expressed idiomatically (“opened up a way of communicating I didn’t know I was missing”) rather than through a generic, memorised phrase like “it changed my life,” showing genuine range and control of less common collocations.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
A wide range of structures is used accurately: a past habitual (“I went once a week”), a concessive clause (“which was intimidating to start with but honestly forced me…”), and a mixed conditional-style structure for the counterfactual (“without her having to switch to writing things down”) are all produced with no errors, alongside consistently correct past-tense narrative throughout the learning story.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most common band-6 error on a skill-based card is giving only a vague, unquantified timeframe (“it took a while”) instead of a specific, credible duration, which is exactly the kind of concrete detail this bullet point is designed to test.