Improving Your Pronunciation In The IELTS Speaking Exam

improving your pronunciation in the IELTS speaking exam. Hi there, my name’s Ben Worthington. Thanks for listening to IELTS podcast.

If you’ve been a long time listener, then hopefully you’re pleased that I’m back. I did take a small break, moving back to the UK, lots of things going on, but I’m back with a vengeance. Now, so let’s just talk about what we’re going to cover in this podcast.

We’re going to look at what the examiner is actually listening for when they mark your pronunciation. You’ll learn the five features that make up this score and why your accent is probably not one of them. And you will hear why the sounds your own language change you to make are the ones costing you the points and you’ll also get a couple of exercises to start today so if you are worried you sound too Indian, too Chinese or too Spanish to get a band seven then you’re in for a good treat because hopefully what I can share with you will will stop your worries or ease your worries.

And let me just say before we jump into today’s tutorial, I have, I’m coming at this from like my own personal experience. When I was 18, I left my home county in England, in Yorkshire. I left Yorkshire and I went to Australia.

And nobody understood me. Nobody. I mean, it’s the same language, so obviously they weren’t completely flummoxed.

However, it was surprising. Like, a lot of people just did not have a clue what I was saying. I had to really slow it down.

I had to be… It was the first time I’d actually become aware of how I’d sounded because I’d never lived anywhere else. I’d stayed in the civilized world and then I left it for Australia.

I’m just joking. Australia is a beautiful place. They’re amazing people.

But it was just really surprising sometimes and they didn’t understand. And anyway, by the time my stay in Australia had finished, I came back speaking very differently. And that wasn’t the first time I had to change how I spoke when I started speaking English again I had to annunciate which is what a lot of English teachers do so that the students understand that it’s when you pronounce every single syllable in the word and then when I learned Spanish I had to be aware of my accent and this is the beauty of actually learning a foreign language of learning a second or third language is not only is your vocabulary going to expand but you just become more aware and in most cases more understanding of other students.

So let’s just have a look at the first part okay a lot of students ask me if they should sound British or American and if you want to sound intelligent you have to go with British every time. No, I’m just joking. No, it doesn’t matter.

Honestly, if you sound British or if you sound American, sometimes you might accidentally mix the two, but that’s okay. If you can’t, if you can’t, it won’t help you, but it won’t hurt you. If you know, like, what usually happens is, I mean, this is, I’m after talking with lots of exiles, examiners and current examiners, is the process is when a student starts speaking and this is the goal of part one is not only to get the student relaxed but also to tune in to the the way of speaking and when the examiner’s tuning in or when anybody is listening to you for the first time they are tuning in it’s like when you find a radio station when you tune in and you need a few seconds just to sort of like understand how they pronounce how they speak and if you’re switching between American and British it just makes it a little bit more difficult but I think the easiest way forward here would just be to go with something like universal which basically just goes for clarity okay so that should be your main goal don’t worry if they sound British don’t worry if you sound American if you are finding yourself switching between the two that’s actually a good sign because you’re aware and then maybe just try and choose one of them and you might even go for Australian.

I mean, if you’re living in Australia, it makes sense because you’ll have every single day to practice, you know, whereas if you’re in Vietnam, I guess you could choose between American, British or Australian. And I guess it depends like what you started out with, what you’re comfortable with. If you’re consuming just American media, then you might want to just choose American.

But either way, clarity should be your goal. And also just choose one that’s going to fit in with your direction. If you’ve got your heart set on going to the UK, then it’s probably worthwhile pushing putting more attention on a British pronunciation and involving yourself in British media, immersing yourself not involving yourself.

Now then let’s jump into what is actually being marked. So it’s how precisely you form individual sounds, how you stress the words and the sentences and how your voice rises and falls, which is intonation. Now a Band 9 speaker will use the full range of these with control and the listener never has to work.

Okay? And that’s the key there, okay? There’s never any sort of like fast like what’s he trying to say is just crystal clear and did you notice when I was going through those I did not mention accent okay a band nine speaker uses the full range of individual sounds stresses and sentences with control and the listener never has to work and also intonation okay so So we’re not talking about speed, we’re not talking about accent, we’re talking about clarity.

Now if you’ve been listening to me for a while, you’ll realize that it’s possibly quite difficult to place my accent. I mean I was at a meeting just a week ago and somebody was like, really? Your English?

Yeah, I grew up here. I did spend 20 years of Broadway. Yes, I’m English and they’re like wow And it’s only fortunately that somebody was like, oh, I knew your sister at school I was in the year above you, you know, but what I’m saying is like It for some people first especially here in Yorkshire I don’t sound like a local and even though everything is perfect when I speak English There’s no grammar errors, obviously there’s no pronunciation errors, but it’s still sort of like trips people up.

I mean, these were IELTS examiners I was talking to, obviously. But what I’m saying is like they didn’t stumble on the clarity. The clarity was perfect.

It was just the accent. And in the exam, your criteria is clarity as well. Now, let’s just dive into some of those features I mentioned.

Intonation, this is the music of your speech. So every language has its own language and what you’ll find is that you’ll probably carry your own language’s music into your English. And you need to be aware of this.

What I’d recommend is just jumping on AI and just say, I’m from Spain, are the common mistakes English, Spanish speakers or speakers of Spanish make when speaking English you know or what are the common mistakes and native Urdu speaker will make when speaking English okay and then you can pinpoint it and you could even probably ask Chachibiti some exercises there and there’s plenty of pronunciation apps out there. So just going back to intonation a write in English and I think in most languages is what happens is when you rise up at the end it sounds like you’re making a question and when I came back from Australia I did this all the time and it irritated everybody but for some reason it’s just quite common for British people when they do come back from Australia to start talking like this.

Thankfully I got rid of that. Now if you have a flat tone across the answer it makes you sound bored even when you might be interested and this one is incredibly challenging to solve because like first of all you need to be aware of it and then you need to figure out how to solve it. Now there’s a few different ways you can avoid this.

One is to start putting the stress on the most important word in the sentence. Another way is to add pauses. You see what I did there?

You can add, it’s called a pregnant pause but what you do is you just add them in between your sentences and it makes you sound more interesting. If you look, who’s that guy from Apple? It’s not Tim Cook.

This is so embarrassing. The founder of Apple, if you ever listen to one of his speeches, he uses that a lot and it just makes him far more engaging. Now, a good solution, one that when I started preparing students for IELTS, I started asking ex-IELTS examiners and current examiners how they helped students and I remember one story a teacher was really worried about the student and she said look you’ve got to improve your speaking you need to get onto it and she gave him some exercises and he came back like two weeks later and he was incredible he’d easily jumped like half a band possibly even a full band and she’s like wow what on earth did you do and he said he was listening to BBC news the British news the one with the British presenters and he was just copying what they were saying and by doing that and just mimicking the sound he not only improved his vocabulary but it just sounded so much more natural because he’d copied, he’d mimicked a native English speaker, it improved his vocabulary, it improved his intonation, he improved his pronunciation and he just did that like for a couple of hours every single day and it’s even more straightforward in 2026 now.

You just pause, repeat what you hear and go back and I think there’s even apps out there that will compare and help you do that and compare what you were supposed to say with how you sounded. The next skill that we can use is called chunking. This is where you break your speech into groups and when it’s done well what it does is hands the listener your meaning in neat little packages.

Now you’ve got to be careful though because Because if you stop in the middle of a sentence, or it doesn’t make much sense, it can really lose the listener. A good shortcut to chunking is compound nouns, colour, television, mobile, phone. And the deeper you get into the English language, and we’ve got a lot of these actually in the online course but it’s like empirical evidence has shown for example it’s not the most common one but that phrase empirical evidence has shown you know you just remember that little chunk and now you can use it in your IELTS task 2 essay and when you do use it in spoken English then you sound quite academic and it’s just a little chunk you know and it’s even better if you can extract these chunks in the natural environment.

What do I mean by that? So when you’re maybe listening to the news and repeating it and you’re like, ah actually that’s the third time I’ve heard that sentence. I’m going to actually steal that sentence, try and use it in my own vocabulary.

The next time I’m on a call, the next time I’m working with a friend. Hey Dave, did you take the croissants out of the oven? Empirical evidence has shown, Dave, that you leave them in for two more minutes.

I’m just joking. Obviously, what I’m trying to say there is you use them in context. So if you are working in a bakery, then you might not be using empirical evidence has shown.

Now, the next skill tease is the timing and why English can sometimes feel uneven. So with English it’s stress timed. Stressed syllables are longer and unstressed ones get squashed up.

So many languages are syllable timed where every syllable gets roughly equal length. Obviously there are some that go tones, I think maybe Chinese and some even have a pattern on the verbs, on the vowel sounds, like Hungarian, for example. What I’m trying to say is that if you ignore the natural rhythm of the stressors, of the words and the stresses, then you’re going to sound robotic and it’s far easier for the listener to sort of like tune out and to get lost especially in IELTS examiner who’s probably on the like 20th listening to the 20th student that day you know so that stress on the sound again there is there are apps out there that can help you speed along your process speed up your process with the stress now the word stress is so important that it can even change the meaning so if we look at the word record okay if we say like record the first thing is there is a record of crime has hit new a new record in Birmingham for example or I could say, I am recording, that’s too exaggerated, I’m recording a new podcast about the crime records in Birmingham, for example.

So it’s exactly the same word, exactly the same letters, exactly the same spelling, obviously, but the stress, record, record. there’s many of these in the English language. Now the last one I want to mention is that I briefly mentioned it before but your own language will leave an impression on English when you’re speaking English.

So as I said at the beginning you’re best going to chat to your PT and just finding out out. What are the common weak spots of native Italian speakers when speaking English? Chaci Peter, Chaci Peter will say, Italian speakers will sing the English language from personal experience.

That’s what I’ve noticed of Italian speakers. In fact, I had an Italian friend in Valencia and she would go, Ben, and I’d say, no, no. Carolina, my name has one syllable Ben it’s not Ben okay so that just a little anecdote there now let’s finish off this podcast I’m going to give you four exercises you can start today you can record yourself and you can compare you can use dictation software you can sing along to English songs you can mimic as I mentioned before.

Personally, mimicking is my favorite. And that’s why I’m just going to go into it in detail a little bit more. I’m not a fan of singing.

The dictation software is sort of like one of those that’s good in principle, but I know nobody gets around to doing it. I know from personal experience of learning second and third language, but mimicking, I think it can be quite fun. You can choose your authentic material, choose material that interests you.

Are you interested in the Premier League, Formula One, science talks, TED talks, self-development talks, especially self-development talks or self-health talks. The speakers there are incredibly charming and they’re very charismatic. And just choose one, pause, listen, you’re going to learn something so you’re killing two birds with one stone as well and if you choose a topic you’re interested in you’re obviously going to be more glued to it as well you’re going to keep coming back.

So yeah those are the four ways you can you can improve. Now if you are stuck with your IELTS speaking then don’t worry you’re not alone you can get in contact just send an essay so send send an email we can help you out everything’s back up and running now at IELTSpodcast.com that’s seriously distracted a lot of things going on in my personal life so now it’s I wouldn’t say stable but it’s more stable so I’ve got time to come back to doing this you send an email to ben at IELTSpodcast.com it can give you some feedback give you some help and yep you can go over to also go over to IELTSpodcast.com and subscribe there and you’ll get more help through your inbox so thank you very much for listening and wishing you a super day and good luck with your IELTS exam