How IELTS Speaking is marked

Speaking is assessed on four criteria, each worth a quarter. Two of them are widely misunderstood, and the misunderstanding costs candidates marks they did not need to lose.

Fluency and Coherence

This is about whether you can keep going and whether your answers hang together. It is not about speed. Speaking quickly to sound fluent usually damages the score, because it produces more errors and less coherence.

Hesitation is only penalised when it is about language — searching for a word. Pausing to think about an idea is normal speech, and marking it with "That's an interesting question, let me think" costs nothing. What does hurt is self-correcting repeatedly and abandoning sentences halfway.

Lexical Resource

Range and precision, plus the ability to paraphrase when a word will not come. That last part is explicitly rewarded: not knowing a word is fine if you can talk around it. Memorised phrases are the trap — examiners are trained to recognise them, and a recited chunk that does not quite fit the question scores worse than plain language that does.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy

Variety of structures, under control. The most reliable way to show range in Speaking is not to attempt exotic constructions but to let the questions pull you into different tenses — Part 1 asks about now, Part 2 usually about the past, Part 3 about hypotheticals and the future.

Pronunciation

Whether you can be understood, and how much effort it takes to follow you. Accent is not penalised. What matters is word stress, sentence stress and the pauses between thought groups. A strong accent with clear stress patterns scores well; a weak accent with flat, unstressed delivery does not.

What this means in practice

None of the four criteria measures the content of your answer. You are not being marked on whether your opinion is interesting or your example is true. Candidates who spend preparation time collecting facts are optimising for a criterion that does not exist.