Speaking Part 2: Cue Card (Long Turn): Question 9
Syllabus S.part2
Describe a time when you helped another person.
You should say:
- who you helped
- what the situation was
- what you did to help this person
and explain how you felt about helping them.
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 answer moves through a clear problem-action-reflection structure. The situation is set up quickly, the actions are sequenced with natural linking (“What I ended up doing was… and then…while also…”), and the response closes with genuine reflection rather than simply stopping after the action. This shape sustains the full two minutes without the candidate needing to pause or repeat themselves.
Lexical Resource
Precise, situation-specific vocabulary is used throughout (“twisted her ankle”, “couldn’t get any grip”, “felt faint”), and the closing reflection uses more abstract, natural evaluative language (“small, immediate actions can matter far more than people assume”) rather than a generic statement like “I felt happy”. This range across concrete narration and reflective comment is a strong band 9 marker.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
Multiple actions are packed accurately into a single complex sentence using parallel non-finite clauses (“helping her up carefully, walking her inside… and then calling her daughter… while also phoning for a taxi”), which is genuinely demanding to control under time pressure. Past perfect (“She’d twisted her ankle”) is used correctly to mark the ankle injury as prior to the candidate’s arrival. Note: Pronunciation cannot be assessed from a written transcript, but the informal closing tag (“which is quite nice, actually”) reflects the kind of natural, spoken stress pattern a band 9 candidate would use aloud.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is spending so long setting up the situation that the actual helping actions and the final feelings bullet get rushed or dropped entirely near the two-minute mark.