IELTS Speaking Part 3: Lesson 8

Why this stage: they arrive assuming Part 3 is more of Part 2. Break that assumption now, before you teach anything.

1. 3 min. Take in the homework. Go round the room: each student says the second at which they dried up in their recording. One number each. Write the numbers in a row on the board. Do not let this become a discussion.
2. 2 min. Ask: “What are the four things the examiner gives you a score for?” Get all four out of them. Then tell them: “Part 3 is marked on exactly the same four. Only the task changes.”
3. 5 min. Copy this onto the board and leave it there for the whole lesson:

                   PART 2            |   PART 3
     length        1-2 min, one turn |   about a minute, then a new one
     shape         you talk alone    |   a conversation, with follow-ups
     prep          1 minute + paper  |   NONE
     what about    your life, past   |   PEOPLE IN GENERAL

   Then point at the bottom line and say: “Part 1 asked about you. Part 2 asked for a story about you. Part 3 asks what people in general do, and why. If you answer about yourself, you are answering a different question from the one you were asked.”

Why this stage: so that they hear a question and know immediately how to open. That recognition is the entire stage.

1. 3 min. Board this, and say “you do not get a new topic in Part 3. It is the same theme as your card, made general”:

   PART 2 CARD:  "Describe a time you learned something new."
                           |
                           v
   PART 3, same theme, now general:
     "Do you think the most useful things are learned at school, or outside it?"
     "How is the way children learn today different from 30 years ago?"
     "Why do some people keep studying all their lives?"

2. 4 min. Tell them three facts about Part 3, and no more than three:
   • It lasts 4 to 5 minutes, about 5 or 6 questions.
   • No card, no paper, no thinking time. You hear the question once, but you may ask for it again.
   • The examiner may cut you off to keep to time, and may ask why more than once. Both are normal, and neither means you are doing badly.
3. 5 min. Board the four types exactly like this, saying the example question aloud as you write each line:

   NAME THE TYPE, THEN YOU KNOW HOW TO START
   
     OPINION    "Do you think...?"        -> pick a side, sentence one
     COMPARE    "How has ... changed?"    -> then / now / which is better
     CAUSE      "Why do people...?"       -> one main reason, properly
     FUTURE     "Will ...?"               -> a prediction + a hedge

4. 3 min. Drill it. Read these six aloud, one at a time, in this order. The whole class calls out the type together, no hands up. The answer is in brackets for you.
   1. Do you think the most useful things in life are learned at school, or outside it? (opinion)
   2. What would happen if the biggest cities stopped growing? (future)
   3. Why do you think some families stay close while others drift apart? (cause)
   4. How is the way people get news today different from in the past? (compare)
   5. Whose responsibility is protecting the environment, governments or individuals? (opinion)
   6. How has the way people shop changed in the last twenty years? (compare)
   Aim for under two seconds each. Then finish the stage with these check questions:

   Check questions

   • How long do I get to prepare? (no time at all)
   • Should each answer be about two minutes? (no, about a minute)
   • Do I have to give a balanced answer? (no, take a side and support it)

Why this stage: they will not want the frame you teach in Stage 4 until they have felt the problem themselves. So you teach nothing here.

1. 2 min. Put them in pairs. Give each pair Set A and Set B, cut out, one sheet each. Then give the instruction, in these words: “A, you are the examiner. Read your three questions one at a time, and do not react. Do not agree, do not nod, do not smile. B, answer them. A, write down next to each question how many seconds B spoke for. Then swap sheets and swap roles.”
2. 10 min. They run it, about 5 minutes each way. Say nothing about quality and correct nothing. Walk round with paper and copy down the first words of four or five different answers, exactly as they said them.
3. 8 min. Now show them the problem. Write three of the openings you collected on the board, with no names attached. They will mostly look like “I think in my country…”, “For me, personally…”, or just “Yes.” Then ask: “The question was about people in general. Who is this answer actually about?” Let them work it out. Board the two shapes:

   TOO PERSONAL   one story about me, so the real question
                  is never answered
   
   TOO SHORT      an opinion with no reason under it, done in
                  8 seconds, examiner left doing the work

   Finish by having each student write one sentence privately, on paper they keep: “In Part 3, my answers break because ______.” Nobody reads it out. They look at it again at the end of Stage 7.

Why this stage: this is the lesson. One frame that fits any Part 3 question. Protect all 25 minutes of it.

1. 3 min. Board this in the centre and keep it up for the rest of the lesson:

   POSITION  ->  REASON  ->  EXAMPLE  ->  SO / BUT
   one          the marks    about        close it, or
   sentence     are here     other people give one inch
   
                     ABOUT ONE MINUTE

   Then say: “This is Answer, Reason, Detail from Lesson 1, with one beat added. The only real change is that the detail is now about other people, not about you.”
2. 5 min. Read the model below aloud twice. The first time straight through at normal speaking speed, so they hear how much a minute actually holds. The second time, stop after each sentence and ask them which beat it was.

   “Why do you think fewer young people are learning to cook?”

   [Position] “The main reason, I'd say, is simply that they don't really need to.

   [Reason] Delivery apps have made a hot meal about as easy to get as one you cook yourself, and often not much more expensive, so the pressure to learn has gone.

   [Example] Among people I studied with, I can think of two who cook properly during the week, and both of them do it because they enjoy it rather than out of necessity.

   [So/But] So I'd say it's less that the skill is dying out, and more that it's turning into a hobby.”

   Four sentences. About a minute.

3. 2 min. Tell them what goes wrong in each beat. This is for saying, not for copying onto the board.

   Beat	Its job	What goes wrong
   Position	Answer the question in one sentence	Sitting on the fence, or repeating the question back
   Reason	Say why. The marks are here	Saying the position again in different words, then stopping
   Example	Evidence. Can be personal	The example eats the whole answer
   So/But	Close it, or admit what the other side gets right	Trailing off and leaving the examiner to rescue you

4. 15 min. The finger drill. Six or seven answers, one student each.
   1. Nominate a student by name. Never ask for volunteers.
   2. Read one question from the list below. Start the visible timer.
   3. While they speak, say nothing. Hold up one finger when you hear the Position, two at the Reason, three at the Example, four at the close.
   4. When they stop, read out the time. Then ask the class the only question that matters: “Which beat never came?”
   5. Next student, next question.

   Questions for the drill, in this order:

   1. Why do so many people move to big cities?
   2. Is life in a city better today than it was for your grandparents?
   3. Should governments spend more on public transport, or on roads?
   4. What would happen if the biggest cities stopped growing?
   5. Why do some people leave the city and move to the countryside?
   6. How important is it for a city to have green space?
   7. How has the cost of housing changed the way young people live?

Why this stage: the shape is in place, so now give them the language that fills it. This is most of the distance between band 6 and band 7.

1. 2 min. Read the two answers in Appendix D aloud, at the same speed, and ask “same opinion, same length: what makes the second one better?” Take two or three guesses, do not confirm yet. The rest of this stage is the answer.
2. 6 min. Hedging. Board these four and nothing else:

   DON'T CLAIM MORE THAN YOU KNOW
   
     tends to  ·  most people would say  ·  is likely to
                ·  broadly speaking  ·

   Then work through these out loud. Say the left version, let them repair it into the right one.

   They say	You want
   “Everyone thinks…”	“Most people would probably say…”
   “It is…”	“It tends to be…”
   “This will happen.”	“This is likely to happen.”
   “In my country we…”	“In most places, people…”
   “Young people don't read.”	“There's a tendency, particularly among younger people, not to read.”

3. 3 min. Phrases for building the Reason beat. Board one from each line:

   CAUSE      stems from · is driven largely by · comes down to
   EFFECT     leads to · results in · means that
   CONTRAST   while · compared with · unlike · far more likely to

   Point out that while is the joiner from Lesson 7. Part 3 is where they finally have something to do.
4. 9 min. The repair drill. Board both weak answers first, before you explain anything:

   WEAK 1  -  claims too much
   Q: Why do people move to big cities?
     "Everyone moves to the city. All the jobs are
      there. In my country the villages are empty."
   
   WEAK 2  -  all about me
   Q: Has technology made people less social?
     "Yes. My brother is always on his phone. He
      never talks to us at dinner. It is annoying."
   
   FIX BOTH:  2 hedges  +  1 cause or contrast phrase

   Then the instruction, in these words: “In pairs, say each of these again so it sounds like a band 7 answer. At least two hedges, and one phrase from the cause or contrast list. Four minutes.” Four minutes in pairs, five minutes taking versions and correcting them. This is the one stage where you do correct the language properly.
   Model repairs, if they need to hear one:

   Weak 1. “It comes down to work, mainly. The majority of well-paid jobs are concentrated in a handful of cities, whilerural areas have seen very little investment, so for a lot of young people it isn't really a choice.”

   Everyone became the majority of, and the contrast now carries the reason.

   Weak 2. “Less social face to face, probably, though people are in contact more than ever. There's a tendencyto treat a message as equivalent to a conversation. My own brother is a good example: he's on his phone right through dinner. Sothe amount of contact has gone up while the depth of it has gone down.”

   The brother is still there, but he arrives as the example, after the general point.

Why this stage: one moment breaks candidates more than any other, a topic they know nothing about. It is nerve rather than language, so what they need is sentences they can say without thinking.

1. 4 min. Say this first, plainly: “Part 3 is not a knowledge test. An invented answer that is well argued scores exactly the same as a true one. Silence scores nothing.” Then board these three:

   NO IDEA?  SAY SOMETHING ANYWAY
   
   1  buy a second       "So, whether ... ? That's an
                          interesting one."
   
   2  admit, then invent "I've never really thought
                          about it, but I'd imagine ..."
   
   3  shrink it          "I can't speak for everywhere,
                          but certainly where I live ..."

2. 2 min. Model it once. Ask one student “Should governments spend public money on the arts?” and answer it yourself, out loud, opening with move 2 and then running the four beats as normal. Then name what you did: “I admitted I had not thought about it, and I still spoke for a minute. That costs nothing. Stopping costs everything.”
3. 3 min. The drill, in pairs, one minute per answer. Name the move each student has to open with before they start, so nobody picks the easy one twice.
   1. Do museums still matter now that everything is online?
   2. Why do some countries produce far more top athletes than others?
   3. Should governments spend money on space exploration?
   4. Is classical music likely to disappear?
   Instruction, in these words: “You are not allowed to say ‘I don’t know’. Open with the move I gave you, then four beats as normal. Two questions each, then swap.”
4. 3 min. Three lines to have ready, and then move on. Say it accurately first: “The examiner will not argue with you. They have no opinion and they will not tell you that you are wrong. But a question can still put another view to you, and outside this exam it happens constantly. So have these ready and never repeat yourself louder.”

   IF SOMEONE PUTS THE OTHER SIDE TO YOU
   
   1  hold on       "I can see why people say that, but
                     I still think ... because ..."
   
   2  narrow it     "That's fair up to a point. It's
                     probably true of cities, less so of
                     smaller towns."
   
   3  change your   "Actually, that's a good point.
      mind          Rather than X, I'd now say ..."

   Drill it once, no more: read “Should university be free for everyone?” to the class, take one answer, then reply “and yet free education is often said to be lower in quality” and have that student use move 1 or move 2. Then stop. Changing your mind costs nothing; going silent costs marks.

Why this stage: everything at once, under test conditions, with every student getting one turn as the candidate and one as the examiner.

1. 2 min. Set up. Pairs, not with their diagnostic partner. Two roles only: examiner and candidate. Number the pairs out loud as you make them, pair 1 to pair 4, and board the two lines below so you never have to remember who has what. Each of the eight examiner cards holds a different topic and a different three questions, so nobody is asked the questions printed on their own card.

   PAIR 1 -> cards 1 & 2      PAIR 3 -> cards 5 & 6
   PAIR 2 -> cards 3 & 4      PAIR 4 -> cards 7 & 8
   
     the ODD card asks first, the EVEN card asks second

   Tell them two things: read your questions in order, and do not react. Then say the rule that makes this work: “While you listen, you are filling in the card. Say nothing until the round ends.”
2. 12 min. Two rounds of six minutes. Call the clock yourself and call the swap out loud, or this stage will eat Stage 8.
   • Round 1, 3 min: the odd-numbered card asks. Three questions, about a minute each.
   • 2 min: the examiner hands the card over and says one thing that worked and one thing to fix, straight off it.
   • 1 min: swap the roles. Round 2 is the same, from the even-numbered card.
   While they run it, read the dashboard rather than trying to stand next to four conversations at once. Every student is the examiner exactly once, so eight rows appear, and the columns tell you which pairs were 30 seconds and which were 90.
3. 1 min. Tell them to read the sentence they wrote in Stage 3 and ask themselves one thing: “Is it still true?” Nobody has to share it.

1. 3 min. Point at the board and ask. Do not tell them. If they can say these five things back to you, the lesson landed.
   1. Part 3 is about people in general. Your own life is the example, never the whole answer.
   2. Name the type, then take a side in the first sentence.
   3. Four beats, about a minute. The Reason carries the marks.
   4. Hedge when you generalise: tends to, most people, is likely to.
   5. No idea about the topic? Say so and invent an answer anyway. Pushed on your view? Hold it, narrow it, or change your mind on purpose. Never freeze.
2. 2 min. Set the homework:
   Homework: Choose three questions from Set D. Record one answer to each. No notes, and no second attempt. Then listen back once, with the four beats written in front of you, and write down which beat was missing in each answer. Bring the three answers to that, not the recordings. Then answer one question for yourself: which beat goes missing most often?