Speaking Part 2: Cue Card (Long Turn): Question 6
Syllabus S.part2
Describe a book or a film that you particularly enjoyed.
You should say:
- what the book or film was
- what it was about
- when and how you first came across it
and explain why you enjoyed it so much.
You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make some notes to help you if you wish.
Show worked solution Hide worked solution
Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 long turn
Fluency & Coherence
The response runs as a single, continuous piece of extended speech rather than a series of disconnected answers to each bullet. It moves between points using natural spoken connectors (“Basically”, “What I found so striking was”, “The reason I enjoyed it so much, though”) rather than mechanically announcing “firstly… secondly…”, and a brief personal digression (talking about it with a brother, comparing it to a grandfather) is exactly the kind of self-extension examiners reward, since it shows the candidate can develop ideas without needing further prompting.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is precise and topic-appropriate without sounding memorised: “stayed with me”, “no big dramatic twist”, “rewards patience”, “moody shots of the sea”. The candidate also self-corrects fluently mid-thought (“it’s a fairly small, independent film, not something you’d necessarily have heard of”) in a natural, unforced way, which is characteristic of confident spoken production rather than a rehearsed script.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
A wide range of structures appears under time pressure: relative clauses (“an elderly man who’s spent almost his whole life…”), a fronted contrast (“What I found so striking was…”), and accurate present perfect/past mixing to move between the film’s story and the candidate’s own experience of watching it. Note: Pronunciation cannot be assessed from a written transcript, but natural spoken features here (contractions, dashes marking self-correction) reflect the kind of unscripted, connected delivery a band 9 candidate would produce aloud.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is over-narrating the plot at the expense of the final “explain why” bullet, which is usually where the strongest, most personal language of the whole response should appear.