Three parts, sixteen minutes, taken in pairs. There is no Check button on this page and there is no score, because a spoken answer is not something a web page can mark. This is the scaffolded mock, so the order is the help: read the model and the language before you speak, decide the shape of your answer out loud, record it — and then record it once more with the model closed. That second recording is the one to keep.
The examiner asks each candidate a few general questions. It is short, it is not a warm-up and it is assessed. Two or three sentences per answer: a direct response, a reason, and one concrete example. On this mock, read the model first and notice its shape — a side taken in the first word, a reason, a concession, a closing turn — then answer the other three questions in that shape.
In Part 1 the examiner is establishing a baseline — how you sound when you are not under pressure — and giving you an easy place to show natural language. The questions are ordinary. The answers should not be.
The scaffolded way to do this part: read the model answer below once, out loud. Then, for each of the four questions, say your first sentence aloud before you press record. If the first sentence takes a side, the rest of the answer follows; if it starts with “Well, it depends”, start again.
Examiner: Do you think humour travels between languages?
Candidate: Badly, on the whole, and I think the reason is more interesting than the fact. What travels is the mechanism — the surprise, the second meaning arriving late — and what does not travel is the permission. A joke about the weather works in Britain because everybody has already agreed that the weather is a safe target; the same joke in my country gets a polite silence, not because it is not funny but because nobody has agreed yet that you are allowed to make it. So I would say humour travels, and the licence to use it does not. When I first arrived here I got the jokes and still could not tell them, which is a strange place to live for a couple of years.
Why this is a top-band answer, and it is only forty seconds long: it takes a side in the first word; it makes one distinction (mechanism against permission) and holds it through the whole answer; the example is concrete and slightly unexpected; and it closes on a personal turn that is an observation rather than a complaint. Notice what it does not do: no “that’s a great question”, no list of three, no “in conclusion”.
Before you record: say your own first sentence aloud, twice. It must take a side. Then record all four answers in one take. Then record them again with this box scrolled off the screen.
The examiner gives you both a set of prompts and a question. You talk to each other for about two minutes, and then the examiner gives you a second question and you have about one minute to reach a decision. You are marked on the discussion, not on being right — and Interactive Communication is a quarter of the mark here.
The situation: A national newspaper is adding one new weekly column about language. Five ideas have been proposed.
A · What they really meant. Each week, one public statement — a minister, a company, a football manager — translated into what it actually says.
B · Word of the week. The history of one word, from where it came from to what it quietly means now.
C · Overheard. Real sentences collected on buses and in queues, printed without comment.
D · The joke, explained. A comedian takes one joke apart and shows why it worked.
E · Say it plainly. Readers send in official letters they cannot understand; the column rewrites them.
First question (talk to each other, about 2 minutes): Here are some ideas for a weekly column about language. Talk to each other about how well each of these would help readers understand the way English is actually used.
Second question (about 1 minute): Now decide which two the newspaper should run, and which one should start first.
A · Can I start with the overheard column, because I think it’s either the best idea on the list or a way of filling a page for nothing?
B · Go on — which?
A · It’s the only one that shows you English rather than telling you about it. Everything else on this list has an expert in the middle explaining. This one just prints the sentence and trusts you.
B · I’d push back on that slightly. Trusting the reader is lovely until the reader isn’t British — and the question says “how English is actually used”, which for a lot of readers means “what did that actually mean”. The overheard sentence without the translation is exactly the thing they can’t read.
A · That’s fair, and it’s the argument for the first one, isn’t it — the translation of the minister. That’s doing the same job as the overheard column but with the key printed underneath.
B · Which is why I’d rank it top. And the plain-letters one is the same idea again, pointed at the reader’s own post. Those two are useful. The word-of-the-week is charming and nobody changes how they speak after reading it.
A · So we’re circling two: the translation column and the letters column. Shall we say the translation first, because it’s free to produce — there’s a new statement every week — and the letters second, because it needs readers to send things in?
B · Agreed — A first, E second. Though I notice we’ve just chosen the two that assume the reader can’t understand anything without help, and I’m not sure that’s a compliment to the reader.
What the examiners are hearing: neither candidate goes through the list in order; both use each other’s words (trusting the reader, the same job); there is a real disagreement that changes A’s mind rather than being dropped; the evaluating language is unforced (either… or, I’d push back, which is why); and the decision is closed out loud, with a last observation that shows the speaker is still thinking.
Before you record: say your opening line aloud. Then record the four minutes with a partner if you have one, or both sides if you do not. Then close this model and record it again.
Each candidate gets a card with one question and three ideas, and speaks alone for two minutes. The partner then comments for about a minute, and the examiner asks both of you a further question. Then there is a five-minute discussion on the wider theme. This part carries the most marks in the paper, and almost all of them are won or lost in the shape of the two minutes. On this mock, the shape is given to you first: read the model, mark its four moves, and build your own turn on them.
Candidate A’s card
To what extent does humour depend on shared knowledge?
· between friends
· across cultures
· across generations
Candidate B’s card
Why do people quote other people?
· to seem knowledgeable
· to avoid responsibility
· to feel part of a tradition
The examiner’s follow-up questions for the discussion — the examiner will choose from these, and will not warn you which:
· Is a joke that has to be explained still a joke?
· Are some things funnier in one language than in another?
· Should public speakers be allowed to use other people’s words without saying so?
· Does quotation keep a culture alive, or stop it thinking?
· Is there any such thing as an original sentence?
A model two-minute long turn on Candidate B’s card: Why do people quote other people?
I want to take the least flattering answer first and then argue my way out of it. People quote other people because it is cheaper than thinking, and because a borrowed sentence arrives with somebody else’s authority already attached. That is the “seeming knowledgeable” of the card, and it is real: I have watched a meeting go quiet because somebody said “as Orwell put it”, when nobody in the room, including the speaker, could have said what Orwell put or where.
But I do not think that is the main reason, and the “avoiding responsibility” prompt is where I would locate the honest one. When I quote, I am very often saying something I believe and do not want to be caught believing. The quotation lets me put the sentence in the room and stand slightly to one side of it — if it lands, it was mine; if it does not, it was Orwell’s. That is not cowardice exactly. It is a way of testing an idea in public without paying the full price of being wrong, and I would distinguish it sharply from the first kind, because the first kind is about the speaker and this kind is about the idea.
Which leaves tradition, and I would use it only to complicate what I have just said. There is a kind of quoting that is not about authority or safety at all — the line at a funeral, the thing your grandmother said that the whole family now says. Nobody is seeming knowledgeable. Nobody is hiding. They are saying: this sentence has been said before, by us, and I am one of us. That is the one kind of quotation I would never want to give up, and it is the one that has nothing to do with whether the sentence is any good.
So: sometimes to look clever, more often to be safe, and occasionally — and this is the occasion that matters — to belong. The test is simple enough. Ask whether the speaker would still say it if nobody had said it first.
What makes it a top-band turn: a position in the first ten seconds, stated as a strategy (“argue my way out of it”); two of the three prompts developed and the third used as the pivot; a genuine distinction made and named (quoting about the speaker against quoting about the idea); one concrete instance, invented on the spot; and a closing sentence that turns the whole turn into a test. The grammar is doing real work — a conditional, a fronted which leaves, a cleft — but none of it was inserted to be noticed.
Before you record: say your first sentence aloud and check it takes a position. Record the two minutes on your card. Then close this model and record the other card, cold.
Nothing on this page is scored, so the numbers below stay empty. That is deliberate: Speaking is assessed by two people in a room, on Grammatical Resource, Lexical Resource, Discourse Management, Pronunciation and Interactive Communication.
On the scaffolded mock the useful comparison is between your two recordings of each part: the one made with the model in front of you and the one made without it. Where the second is shorter, thinner or stops early, that is the part whose shape you have not yet made your own — practise the shape, not the words.