Speaking Part 3: Discussion: Question 9
Syllabus S.part3
The examiner moves on to ask broader, more abstract questions about helping others and volunteering.
- Why do you think some people choose to spend their free time volunteering?
- Should schools require students to complete a certain number of hours of community service?
- Does volunteering benefit the volunteer as much as it benefits the people they're helping?
- How might volunteering patterns change as more people work from home in the future?
- Should companies give employees paid time off specifically to volunteer?
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why these are band 9 responses
Fluency & Coherence
Each answer moves smoothly from an opening position, through a developed reason, to a concrete example or a qualifying comment, without losing the thread of the original question. Cohesive devices like “that said”, “on the other hand” and “so” signal the shift between an idea and its counterpoint clearly enough for a listener to follow the reasoning in real time.
Lexical Resource
Topic-relevant vocabulary (compulsory, redirect, unpaid labour, box-ticking exercise, loyalty) is used precisely and combined with natural spoken hedging (“I suspect”, “I’d say”, “I imagine”) rather than the flatter, more repetitive phrasing a band 6 candidate would default to. Near-synonyms for “help” (support, contribute, give back) are used deliberately to avoid repetition.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
The answers use a wide range of structures with control, including third conditional-style reasoning about hypothetical outcomes (“could easily backfire”), modal speculation about the future (“might also see a rise”, “could actually reduce”), and accurate subject-verb agreement across long, complex sentences. Note that Pronunciation, the fourth IELTS Speaking criterion, cannot be demonstrated in a written transcript and is assessed only in the live test.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is retelling a single personal volunteering story rather than generalising to people, schools or companies as a whole, which is precisely the shift in scope that separates Part 3 from the personal long turn in Part 2.