How IELTS Speaking Is Marked: The Four Criteria Explained

There is no answer key for IELTS Speaking. A certificated examiner talks with you for 11 to 14 minutes, then awards your band against four published assessment criteria. Nothing else enters the score: not your confidence, not how friendly the conversation felt, and not your accent, except where it genuinely affects understanding. If you know what the four criteria reward, you know exactly what to practise.

The four criteria

IELTS publishes both the criteria and the band descriptors that define them. Each criterion carries equal weight, and your Speaking band is the average of the four.

Fluency and coherence measures whether you can keep talking at a normal rate and link your ideas into connected speech. The published indicators are specific: speech that is not excessively interrupted by false starts, backtracking, or pauses spent hunting for words, and turns that follow a logical sequence the listener can track.

Lexical resource measures the range of your vocabulary and the precision with which you use it. It also explicitly rewards paraphrase, which the official criteria describe as "getting round a vocabulary gap by using other words". Running out of vocabulary is expected. What is assessed is whether you can work around the gap.

Grammatical range and accuracy measures the complexity of your spoken sentences on one side, and error density on the other. The range indicators include subordinate clauses, complex verb phrases, and the ability to move elements around a sentence for emphasis. The accuracy indicators are how often errors occur and how much they interfere with meaning.

Pronunciation measures whether a listener can understand you without effort: chunking speech into meaningful units, rhythm and stress, intonation that carries meaning, and clear individual sounds. Accent appears in the criteria only as "the overall effect of accent on intelligibility". A strong accent that is easy to understand costs nothing.

Hesitation is scored by its cause

The descriptors treat pausing with unusual care, and the distinction is worth knowing. At band 8, hesitation is mostly content related: you are deciding what to say, not how to say it. At band 7, hesitation to find words or grammar occurs, often mid sentence, but it does not affect coherence. At band 6, coherence is sometimes lost through hesitation, repetition, or self correction. At band 5, you keep going mainly by repeating yourself and slowing down.

So pausing to think is not the problem. Pausing that breaks the thread of what you are saying is. A short silence before a well organised answer scores better than instant, circling speech.

What changes from band 6 to band 7

Reading the two rows side by side shows the jump clearly. In fluency and coherence, band 6 keeps going but sometimes loses the thread; band 7 produces long turns without noticeable effort. In lexical resource, band 6 has enough vocabulary to discuss topics at length with meaning kept clear; band 7 uses vocabulary flexibly and shows some less common and idiomatic language, with an awareness of style and collocation. In grammatical range and accuracy, band 6 makes frequent errors in complex structures, though they rarely block communication; band 7 produces frequent error free sentences and uses both simple and complex forms effectively.

Pronunciation at band 7 is defined in an unusual way: it shows all the positive features of band 6, plus some but not all of band 8, which asks for sustained rhythm and flexible stress and intonation across long utterances. In practice that means band 7 pronunciation is band 6 clarity plus stretches of genuinely natural delivery.

Two examiner rules apply across all of this. You must fully fit the positive features of a band to receive it, and you are rated on your average performance across all parts of the test. One strong answer does not set your band, and one weak one does not sink it.

How the numbers combine

The examiner awards a band for each criterion and the four are averaged into your Speaking band, reported in whole and half bands. With fluency at 7, vocabulary at 6, grammar at 6, and pronunciation at 7, the average is 6.5. Your Speaking band then joins the other three sections in the overall average. The band score calculator shows how a Speaking band moves your overall score, and IELTS band scores explained covers the scale itself.

Speaking shares three of its four criteria with Writing, but the definitions differ because the medium does. If you are preparing both, How IELTS Writing Is Marked covers the written versions of the same criteria.

The public Speaking band descriptors and key assessment criteria are published on ielts.org. Last checked August 2026.