List of the Topics for Part Two IELTS Speaking Test
One
of the challenging aspects of Part Two is the huge number of potential topics.
Naturally with such a wide range of topics every candidate has certain topic
areas that he or she is comfortable with and others that they find more
difficult.
In
the strategy section of this chapter hopefully this problem will be addressed,
but first it is probably a good idea to look at the Part Two topics.
One
important aspect to recognize is that many of the Part One topics are recycled
as Part Two topics.
Examples:
Part One
Topic Part
Two Topic
Restaurants A
restaurant
Reading A
book
Public transport Form
of public transport
TV TV
programme
The sea A
river, take, sea
Seasons A
season
Clothes An
item of clothing
Photography A
photograph
Hobbies A
hobby
Sports A
sport
Animals An
animal
Buildings A
building
This list could go on, but
the main thing to realize is that most of the topic areas for Part Two are very
similar to Part One. This is to your advantage because it means you can use
Part One language in your Part Two.
There
is no danger of repetition here because if you are given a certain topic in Part
One you will NOT get the same topic in Part Two. So if the examiner asks you
about "animals" in Part One, you will not get the Part Two topic
"Describe an animal..."
Instead
of making a huge list of Part Two topics it is easier to put all of the topics
into groups or categories.
The most obvious categories
are as follows:
- Experiences / Past events
- Objects / Material possessions
- People
- Places
- Media related
- Others (anything that doesn‘t fit into the 5 categories above.)
One
of the advantages of grouping topics together is that when you look at the
relationships between some of the topics you will see that it is in fact
possible to use the same content for more than one topic card.
In this way you don't need
to prepare a separate response for every topic card, you can reuse the same
language for many different topics.
The
individual topic cards are given later in this section.
There
are a number of different ways to deal with Part Two and some are more
effective than others.
From our earlier observations
we can conclude that the best strategy is one which focuses directly on the
features detailed in the marking system and produces as many of these features
as possible in the 2-minute time Game.
One
important area that is often neglected is the one minute preparation time. In
my experience many candidates actually cause problems for themselves in the
one-minute preparation time.
Activity
Look
at the following topic card and make notes for one minute.
Describe
an interesting building in your city.
You should
say:
What the
building looks like
What it
is used for
Why it is
interesting
How often
you visit this building.
Most
people write notes in the following way:
- a Chinese building / old
- its very old
- a library / books
- once a month
What
often happens is that most people write "answers" to the guidelines
and prompts and usually those "answers" are in very simple language.
When
Part Two begins people are focused on their notes - their notes contain
basic answers to the prompts so the focus of their Part Two is basic answers in
response to the prompts. Obviously, this is not an effective strategy.
At
this early stage one effective strategy is to ignore the prompts altogether and
use a simple Three-step Preparation Method.
