IELTS Speaking Pronunciation Practice

IELTS Speaking is marked on four criteria: fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. IELTS says the four carry equal weight, so pronunciation is a quarter of your Speaking score.

Examiners judge pronunciation by how easy you are to understand and how well you use the features of spoken English: individual sounds, word and sentence stress, intonation and linking words together. They do not reward any particular accent, British or American. A strong accent only costs marks when it makes words hard to understand, which is why practising the words you say unclearly pays off.

It checks words. For each sentence you read, the engine scores every word, then the test ranks all your words from weakest to strongest. Each word gets a score from 0 to 100. Green (85 and up), blue (70–84), amber and red are review priorities: start with the lowest words. They are not a pass mark and not a measure of how well people understand you.

It does not mark fluency, stress, intonation, grammar, vocabulary or the content of your answer, and it does not give a band. The reference is standard American English. If you speak with a British accent, words with an r after a vowel (“for”, “dinner”) can score lower here even though they are perfectly correct in the exam; read those words in that light.

These words come up in every topic and are easy to get wrong because their spelling has more letters than their sound. Listen to each one, then say it in a sentence of your own. The capital letters show the stressed syllable.

Record a one-minute answer to a Part 2 card, then listen back and write down three words you said unclearly. Read them in the sentences above or paste them into the free English practice page to see their word scores, and practise them until they come out clearly. Repeat with a new card every day in the last weeks before your test.

Then work on the parts this tool does not mark: speak in phrases rather than word by word, stress the important word in each phrase, and let your voice fall at the end of a statement. Recording yourself and listening back is the simplest way to hear all three.