We present a brief introduction on speaking and one of the English speaking assessments accepted worldwide - IELTS speaking test to help learners of English better understand what speaking is and the relationship of various components of spoken language are. Besides that, a series of corpus-based activities, practice tests, quizzes and resources are designed and compiled for learners to improve English speaking skills on their own.
IELTS Speaking Question Bank
Below are the question banks for each IELTS Speaking part. All the questions are organized by topics. You can use this resource to familiarize questions and topics before the IELTS speaking test.
Practice Test
Before starting the practice test, please make sure that you have been familiar with the test format of IELTS speaking.
Learning Resources
Speaking, as definded by Florez, is "an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing and receiving and processing information” and "often spontaneous, open-ended, and evolving" (1999, p. 1). When we speak, factors from various aspects, such as physical, mental, psychological, social, and cultural, must work together, therefore, speaking is widely considered as a challenging skill. In order to improve speaking skill, a better understanding of fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammar and pronunciation is needed, which is also included as 4 main criteria in IELTS speaking. Accordingly, we compiled the following resources concerning the four components in a systematic way.
◊ A list of discourse markers
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/discourse-markers-so-right-okay
◊ A quiz on discourse markers
https://quizizz.com/admin/quiz/5d5b24147cc330001a951d3a/discourse-markers
◊ Online Collocation Dictionary
https://www.freecollocation.com/
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/browse/collocations/british/a/
◊ Online Idiom Dictionary
◊ Basic grammar
◊ Spoken English Corpus
https://corpus.eduhk.hk/esl_learner_corpus/#/home
◊ English Pronunciation Learning Website
Corpus-based Activity
In recent years, corpus-based approach has been considered effective in language learning. With the use of authentic data from our English Speech Corpus, we designed a series of corpus-based activities to help you gain a deeper understanding of each criteron of the IELTS speaking test and the differences among learners of different proficiency levels.
Click HERE to enjoy the activities.
Corpus&AI-aided spoken English training programme
Employing AI technology to empower language learning has been an emerging trend since the launch of various generative AI robots. Promising results can be found in developing learners’ reading and writing performance, yet on the aspect of speaking. With the support from Faculty Knowledge Transfer Fund, our recent project, entitled “Revolutionizing Language Education: Integrating AI technology into corpus-aided English speaking training”, developed a corpus and AI-aided English speaking learning framework to complement the lack of feedback when learning with corpus with responses from AI robots, and to allow users to judge AI’s feedback from corpus data.
Click HERE to view more.