Speaking Part 2: Cue Card (Long Turn): Question 7
Syllabus S.part2
Describe an event or celebration that you attended.
You should say:
- what the event was
- where and when it took place
- who you went with or who else was there
and explain what made the event memorable for you.
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.
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 long turn
Fluency & Coherence
The account is organised chronologically and clearly signposted (“the first day was mostly about…”, “the second was the main event itself”) without sounding like a rehearsed list, and the final bullet is handled through a genuine narrative shift (“What really made it memorable, though, wasn’t so much… as…”) that isolates one specific moment rather than restating the whole event. This kind of self-correcting, story-shaped structure is exactly what sustains two minutes of natural, uninterrupted speech.
Lexical Resource
Precise, event-specific vocabulary is used throughout (“henna ceremony”, “marquee”, “a sudden downpour”), alongside more abstract evaluative language reserved for the final bullet (“a sense of joy and spontaneity that you just can’t plan for”). The range moves comfortably between concrete description and reflective comment, which is a strong indicator of a wide lexical resource under exam conditions.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
Narrative past tenses are used with full control and appropriately varied (past simple for the main storyline, past continuous for background action, “everyone rushing indoors”, and present perfect for a reflective closing comment, “It’s made me realise…”). Complex sentences with multiple clauses are handled accurately without loss of meaning. Note: Pronunciation cannot be assessed from a written transcript, but the varied sentence stress implied by the dash-marked pivot (“wasn’t so much… as…”) reflects the kind of expressive, unscripted delivery a band 9 candidate would produce aloud.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is answering the “what made it memorable” bullet with a vague restatement of the whole event, rather than isolating one genuinely specific detail or moment, which is what actually convinces an examiner the story is real rather than rehearsed.