Ten Weeks Without a Speaking Partner: How I Raised My IELTS Speaking Score from 6.0 to 7.0

In my first IELTS Speaking test, the examiner asked me to describe a difficult decision I had made. I had prepared a story about choosing my university. I spoke for about fifty seconds, realised I had nothing left to say, and stopped. The examiner waited. I added one sentence about how the decision “changed my life”, then stopped again.

My score was 6.0. I had spent three months memorising answers.

That was the problem. I could recite thirty polished responses, but I could not handle a follow-up question I had not predicted. The test is not a memory contest. It is a conversation with a stranger who is trained to notice when you are reciting.

What changed

I stopped writing answers and started recording myself. For ten weeks, I spent twenty-five minutes a day on a loop that looked like this:

• 4 minutes: answer one Part 1 set, one Part 2 cue card, or three Part 3 questions while recording on my phone.
• 6 minutes: type out exactly what I said, not what I meant to say.
• 5 minutes: mark three things only: filler words, verb tense, and repeated vocabulary.
• 5 minutes: answer the same questions again without notes.
• 5 minutes: listen to both recordings and write one sentence about what improved.

The transcription step felt ridiculous at first. It was also the most useful part. In a 90-second answer, I said “I think” fourteen times. In a past-tense story, I switched to present tense whenever I got excited. I described everything I liked as “good” or “very good”. I had no idea until I saw the words on the screen.

You can do much of this without a teacher. You need a phone, a document, and enough honesty to type the ums.

The weekly structure

Monday, Wednesday and Friday: Part 1 and Part 2. Tuesday and Thursday: Part 3. Saturday: one full mock interview, Parts 1 to 3, without stopping. Sunday: review the week’s recordings and choose one habit to fix.

For Part 1, I aimed for two or three sentences with one specific detail. “I like cooking” is a dead end. “I cook most weekends, usually a Sichuan dish my mother taught me, and I have got much faster at chopping” gives the examiner something to follow.

For Part 2, I wrote four keywords, not sentences. Mine were usually: when, where, what happened, how I felt. Then I told the story as a story, with a small before and after. The last thirty seconds were for reflection, not for adding new facts.

For Part 3, I practised a simple shape: answer the question, give a reason, give an example, then acknowledge the other side. Not every answer needs all four, but having the shape stopped me from freezing. I also practised saying “I am not sure, but I would guess…” because real conversations contain uncertainty.

Pronunciation

I did not try to sound British. I worked on two things: word stress and sentence stress. Each morning I shadowed ten minutes of a podcast, marking the words the speaker stressed. Then I read the same paragraph aloud and compared.

You do not need a British or American accent. What matters is whether your speech is clear and how effectively you use pronunciation features such as stress, rhythm and intonation. For me, clearer stress mattered more than chasing a perfect vowel.

The mock interviews

Friends are useful, but they can sometimes be too polite. They let you finish, they nod, and they do not ask the awkward follow-up. For the twice-weekly full interviews, I used Youshow IELTS, which runs Part 1 to Part 3 as one continuous session and gives feedback on fluency and vocabulary, so I could practise the interruptions and follow-ups I had been avoiding.

That one change mattered more than any vocabulary list. In the real test, the examiner interrupted me in Part 3. I had practised being interrupted. I did not panic.

The result

After ten weeks I took the test again. Listening 8.0, Reading 8.5, Writing 6.5, Speaking 7.0, overall 7.5.

My writing score barely moved, which is fair. I had spent almost all my time on speaking. If your target is a high overall band, do not copy my imbalance. In my case, ten weeks of focused speaking practice made a meaningful difference.

What I would do differently

1. Record a diagnostic answer on day one. Do not guess what your problems are.
2. Learn structures, not answers. A structure survives an unexpected question.
3. Fix one habit per week. I tried to fix everything at once for the first month and improved nothing.
4. Practise being interrupted. Part 3 is not a monologue.
5. Keep a one-page error log. Mine had four columns: date, what I said, what I should have said, and the pattern. By week six I could see the same three mistakes repeating.

For teachers

If you teach speaking, ask for the recording and the transcript, not just the answer. The gap between the two is where the learning is. Mark one pattern per submission. A student who leaves with one clear thing to fix will practise it. A student who leaves with twelve corrections will do nothing.

The last thing

I used to think a higher speaking score required a better accent, a bigger vocabulary, or a paid tutor. For me, it required twenty-five minutes a day and a willingness to listen to my own voice saying the same vague sentence four times.

The score moved when I stopped rehearsing and started noticing.