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. What the page gives you is the real task, the real timings, a model of what a top-band answer sounds like, and a recorder. Do the part, record it, play it back against the model, and say it better.
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. Anything shorter reads as unwilling; anything longer takes your partner’s time.
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 commonest C2 mistake in this part is the prepared speech. An examiner can hear a rehearsed paragraph from the second sentence, and it costs marks under Interactive Communication because it is not a response to what was asked.
Examiner: Do you find it easier to express yourself in speech or in writing?
Candidate: Writing, and I think it’s for a slightly ignoble reason. In writing I get to revise, which means what reaches the reader is my third attempt pretending to be my first. Speech doesn’t give you that. On the other hand, speech gives you the thing writing can never have, which is the other person’s face — you can see the sentence landing badly and change direction halfway through it. So I’d say writing is easier and speech is more useful, and if I had to give one up it wouldn’t be the useful one.
Why this is a top-band answer, and it is only forty seconds long: it takes a side in the first word; it gives a reason that is specific rather than general (“my third attempt pretending to be my first”); it concedes the other side without becoming balanced and dull; and it closes with a small reformulation — easier against useful — which is exactly the kind of precision Lexical Resource rewards. Notice also what it does not do: no introduction, no “that’s an interesting question”, no list.
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 city council is planning a permanent public installation about the way people in the city speak. Five ideas have been proposed.
A · The listening wall. A wall of speakers in a station concourse playing anonymous recordings of ordinary local conversation, refreshed every month.
B · The dictionary of local words. A hundred words used only in this city, engraved into the pavement along one street, each with its meaning.
C · The apology bench. A bench in the market square with a plaque explaining what people here actually mean when they say sorry.
D · The accent map. A large map, lit at night, showing where in the world the city’s residents learned to speak.
E · The silent room. A small free room in the library where no talking is allowed and nothing is explained.
First question (talk to each other, about 2 minutes): Here are some ideas for a public installation about how people in a city speak. Talk to each other about how effective each of these would be at making residents think about their own language.
Second question (about 1 minute): Now decide which two the council should build, and which one should be built first.
A · Shall we start with the silent room, because I think it’s the odd one out and I’m not sure it belongs?
B · Go on.
A · Every other idea explains something to you. The room explains nothing — you just sit in it. Which is either the most sophisticated thing on the list or a way of spending public money on a quiet room.
B · I’d push back on that slightly. It’s the only one that makes you notice your own speech rather than reading about somebody else’s. The dictionary in the pavement is charming, but you walk over it, you say “oh, that’s us”, and you have learned nothing about how you talk.
A · That is a fair point, and I’d still say the listening wall does that job better and more publicly. You hear a stranger use a construction you use forty times a day and it sounds strange in their mouth. That’s the whole effect, and it’s free.
B · Whereas the apology bench is doing the opposite — it hands you the interpretation before you’ve had the experience.
A · Exactly. So shall we say the wall first, on the grounds that it does the work without the explanation, and the bench second because it’s cheap and people will photograph it?
B · Agreed — the wall first. Though I’d note that we’ve just chosen the two most expensive to maintain.
What the examiners are hearing: neither candidate goes through the list in order; both use each other’s words (that job, the opposite); there is a genuine disagreement that is resolved rather than dropped; the hypothetical language is unforced (either… or, I’d still say, on the grounds that); and the decision is closed out loud, with a last observation that shows the speaker is still thinking rather than reciting.
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.
Candidate A’s card
How important is it to say exactly what you mean?
· in personal relationships
· at work
· in public life
Candidate B’s card
Why do people find it hard to change the way they speak?
· habit
· identity
· the reactions of others
The examiner’s follow-up questions for the discussion — the examiner will choose from these, and will not warn you which:
· Is indirectness a form of politeness or a form of evasion?
· Should public figures be held to a different standard of plain speaking from the rest of us?
· Some people say that being able to change how you speak is a skill; others say it is a loss. What do you think?
· Is there anything that can only be said indirectly?
· How far does a language shape what its speakers are able to be honest about?
A model two-minute long turn on Candidate A’s card: How important is it to say exactly what you mean?
I want to take the least comfortable answer to this, which is: much less important than we pretend, and dangerously important in one place.
Start with personal relationships, because that is where the pretence is strongest. We tell each other that honesty is the foundation of intimacy, and then we spend our closest relationships not saying things — not out of cowardice, but because the other person can be trusted to hear what we have left out. If I say to someone I have lived with for twenty years that the evening was fine, we both know precisely what has been reported. Saying exactly what I mean would not be more honest there. It would be a kind of aggression, because it would withdraw the assumption that she can read me.
Work I would put slightly differently. In an office, indirectness is usually about protecting the person who is speaking rather than the person who is listening, and that is a different transaction altogether. When a manager says I wonder whether we might revisit the timeline, nothing is being left for me to infer generously. Something is being made deniable. So I would defend indirectness among equals and be much more suspicious of it wherever there is a difference in power.
Which is where public life comes in, and where I would put the whole weight of my answer. A politician’s vagueness is not politeness and it is not intimacy — there is no shared history with forty million people to draw on. It is simply the ability to be understood as having said two contradictory things. That is the one context in which I would insist on saying exactly what you mean, and it is precisely the context in which it is least likely to happen.
So: not a virtue in itself, and not a vice. It depends entirely on whether the gap between the words and the meaning is being left for the listener or hidden from them.
What makes it a top-band turn: a position in the first ten seconds; two of the three prompts developed and the third used as the pivot rather than an item; a genuine distinction made (indirectness that trusts the hearer against indirectness that protects the speaker); concrete instances, one of them invented on the spot; and a closing sentence that generalises the whole turn in one line. The grammar is doing real work — a fronted which is where…, a conditional, a comparative — but none of it was inserted to be noticed.
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.
The single most useful thing you can do with this page is record Part 3 twice — once cold, once after listening to your own first attempt — and keep both. At C2 the difference between a good long turn and a top-band one is almost never vocabulary. It is structure: whether the two minutes had a shape you decided on before you started talking.