Speaking Part 3: Discussion: Question 2
Syllabus S.part3
IELTS Speaking Part 3, a two-way discussion on tourism and its effects. Typical questions:
- What are the main reasons people travel to other countries as tourists?
- How does mass tourism affect the local economy of a popular destination?
- What negative effects can tourism have on a place and its residents?
- Do you think governments should limit the number of tourists visiting popular sites?
- How do you think tourism will change over the next few decades?
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: Speaking Part 3 assessment
Fluency & Coherence
Answers extend well beyond the minimum needed to address the question, moving through cause, consequence, and a qualifying counterpoint before reaching a summarising conclusion, all linked with natural spoken cohesion (“having said that”, “on balance”, “at the same time”) rather than a rigid list structure. There is no reliance on the examiner prompting further detail, each answer independently develops to a natural, complete length.
Lexical Resource
Topic-specific collocations are used accurately and naturally throughout (“mass tourism”, “visitor caps”, “overtourism”, “footpath erosion”), and less common but precise vocabulary (“dependence”, “diversified”, “fragile sites”) is deployed appropriately rather than forced in. Paraphrase is used to avoid repeating “tourism” or “tourists” mechanically, e.g. “visitor numbers”, “travellers”, “local businesses”.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
The answers show controlled use of a wide grammatical range: real and hypothetical conditionals (“if visitor numbers drop suddenly… the whole local economy can collapse”), passive constructions used appropriately (“profit… flows straight back out”), and speculative future forms (“I imagine sustainability will become…”, “I’d guess we’ll see…”), all produced with no errors of tense, agreement or word form.
(Pronunciation is also assessed in the real Speaking test (stress, intonation and connected speech) but cannot be demonstrated in a written model answer.)
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above. A frequent band 6 pattern is answering Part 3 tourism questions with a personal travel anecdote rather than reasoning about tourism as a general social and economic phenomenon. Examiners are listening for the ability to generalise and evaluate, not to recount a holiday.