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IELTS Speaking Part 2: How to Never Run Out of Things to Say

In Part 2 of IELTS Speaking, you get a cue card, one minute to prepare, and up to two minutes to talk on your own. The Cambridge Guide advises that “you should try to talk for at least two minutes,” and the examiner stops you when the time is up. So the goal of the preparation minute is simple: have more to say than you need.

Why answers die at 30 seconds

Here’s a typical card:

Describe a journey you remember well.

You should say:

- where you went,

- who you went with,

- what happened on the way,

- and explain why you remember it.

And here’s an answer that runs out early:

“I went to the coast, to Budva. I went with my brother. We drove there in his car. On the way, er... we stopped for lunch, and the weather was good. It was a nice journey. So... yes. That’s all, I think.”

The candidate treated the card like a form and gave each prompt one sentence. Once those sentences ran out, the answer had nowhere to go, and the last prompt never got answered. Cambridge is clear that every prompt matters: “It is important to address each one.”

The other common cause is how the preparation minute gets used. If you spend it writing full sentences, your talk ends when your notes do.

The one-minute plan

Split your paper into four corners, one for each part of the card, and fill them with keywords:

• Where / when: Belgrade → coast · 8 hrs · summer after uni · ancient car
• Who: brother Marko · new licence · me = map + music
• What happened: tyre burst · mountains · no signal · farmer on tractor · sea in clothes
• Why I remember it: first trip as adults · family story · loud bang = we laugh

This follows the Cambridge Guide’s Test Tip on p.143. It says to “try not to write too much... note down ideas or words,” and to organise your notes clockwise so your eye finds the next idea quickly. Give the “why” corner the most attention, because that’s where most of your two minutes will come from.

It's also ideal if you can come up with some kind of a story anchor that you can start with and end with.

Turn each note into a small scene

Each keyword prompts three sentences: what happened, one detail you can picture, and how it felt. For the note tyre burst · mountains:

• “About halfway there, we heard a loud bang, and one of the tyres just burst.”
• “We were in the middle of nowhere, and there was no phone signal.”
• “Neither of us had ever changed a tyre before.”

Do that for all four corners and two minutes stops feeling long. Then link the scenes with signposts, so the examiner always knows where you are in the story:

• “The journey I’d like to talk about is...”
• “What I remember most clearly is...”
• “The reason it stuck with me is...”
• “Looking back, ...”

If you still run dry

An exercise in the Cambridge Guide’s Part 2 unit (p.141) lists four moves:

• Look quickly at your notes.
• Look at the question again for anything you missed.
• Go back to an earlier point and add more.
• Keep talking while you think.

For going back, these two phrases help:

• “One thing I forgot to mention is...”
• “I’d just like to add something about...”

The rule to remember

Prepare ideas, not sentences.

Your turn

Give yourself one minute to plan this card. Then talk for two minutes and record yourself:

Describe a place in your city that you like to visit. You should say: where it is, how often you go there, what you do there, and explain why you like it.

When you listen back, check that every prompt got a corner and that you reached two minutes.

The full Speaking Unlocked 2 session, including the pronunciation half, is on my webinars page: https://teacherivanenglish.com/blog/webinars. My IELTS Speaking Course is free, forever, at teacherivanenglish.com.

Why "Utilise" and "Plethora" Won't Get You Band 7

Every week, I read the same essay.

Not literally. But close enough. Candidates and topics change; the vocabulary does not. A plethora of factors. In this modern era. Delve into. Utilise a myriad of resources.

If you use any of that language in your Writing Task 2, this post is for you. Because the words you spent time and energy memorising are the same words capping you at Band 6.

The lie you have been told

Somewhere along the way, an IELTS teacher or a YouTube video told you that bigger words score higher bands. That is why the Top 20 Advanced IELTS Words lists exist. That is why the memorisation happens.

The advice is wrong.

Bigger words do not score higher. Precise words do. And precise words are, more often than not, the small ones you already know.

The three traps

Session 7 of the Writing Masterclass covered three vocabulary traps every Band 6 candidate falls into.

Trap 1: Memorised. Sophisticated single words dropped into places they do not belong. Utilise for use. Plethora for many. Delve into for examine. Individually, none of these words is banned. Stack them together in one paragraph and an examiner reads memorisation, not mastery.

Trap 2: Collocation. Word pairs that break in English. Do a mistake instead of make a mistake. Strong rain instead of heavy rain. Do a suggestion instead of make a suggestion. Collocations are the invisible fabric of the language. When one breaks, a fluent reader feels it before they name it.

Trap 3: Register. Informal words in a formal essay. Kids for children. A lot of for many. Huge for substantial. Stuff for factors. Task 2 is academic writing. Casual vocabulary tells the examiner the candidate cannot shift register.

What Cambridge actually teaches

Here is where the folk wisdom collapses.

The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS, page 125, has a section titled Lexical Resource – avoiding repetition. Cambridge's own instruction on scoring high on Writing Task 2 vocabulary. It lists three moves:

1. Use a synonym
2. Use a pronoun to refer back to an idea (This + noun / These + plural noun)
3. Use a group noun (this approach, these methods)

Now look at the synonyms Cambridge picks in their own exercise. Words like system, facilities, funding, technology. Nothing fancy about any of them. Cambridge does not use utilise or plethora anywhere in that section.

Cambridge is teaching a working vocabulary. Not a costume.

The move that does two jobs at once

There is a bonus buried in the synonym move. It lifts two IELTS scores simultaneously.

The official band descriptors for Writing Task 2 count reference chains - this shift, these methods - as cohesive devices under Coherence and Cohesion, and as vocabulary flexibility under Lexical Resource. One swap, two boxes on the mark sheet.

That is why the fix scales. You are not memorising another list. You are learning one move that lifts a quarter of your Writing score.

Where real vocabulary comes from

Memorised lists never make it into fluent writing because they were never absorbed in context. Real vocabulary is built the way children build it. Through repeated exposure in real sentences.

The habit is simple. One article a day on IELTS-adjacent topics: education, environment, technology, health, urbanisation, work. Sources that repay the time: BBC News long reads, The Guardian, TED talk transcripts, The Economist's Espresso briefing.

Three collocations from each article, noted by topic in a notebook. One sentence of your own using each collocation before the week ends. That is the whole method.

Do it for a month and your writing shifts. Do it for three months and examiners stop capping you.

What to do next

If you attended the Masterclass live, the recordings are yours until 5 October. All seven sessions, free. Rewatch the ones that landed hardest and do the exercises again.

After 5 October, the full replay bundle moves to €39.

Everyone gets the 27-page Complete Checklist. Every rule from every session in one document, ready to sit next to your practice notebook.

Download it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bCyeF6cnKw0ylc3P81IZdfOh5QNsCzzW/view?usp=drive_link

Teacher Ivan