IELTS Speaking Part 2 — Friend You Dislike Cue Card

It tests a single long turn on the confirmed January to April 2026 cue card about a friend you became close to even though you dislike some things about them. The examiner scores you against the four equally weighted public band descriptors: fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. You must cover all four bullets on the card, sustain speech for one to two minutes, stay on the topic given, and answer one or two rounding off questions plus a few abstract Part 3 questions about friendship afterwards.

Use a four move shape. First paraphrase the card line so you are not just repeating it. Second set the scene by saying when and where you met this person. Third develop the body with one or two concrete episodes that cover what you dislike and stay specific rather than listing adjectives. Fourth close with a reflective sentence about why the friendship still matters to you. Vary your tenses across these moves and signpost each move so the examiner can follow the progression.

Stopping after forty to fifty seconds, skipping one of the four bullets, drifting onto a different person, delivering a memorised block that collapses when the examiner interrupts, forcing big or idiomatic vocabulary that does not fit the context, restarting sentences repeatedly through over self correction, rushing so fast that pronunciation and grammar slip, and using only generic adjectives like nice or good without a concrete episode. Any one weak criterion caps the overall band, so a single recurring weakness is enough to lose the eight.

It behaves like a real examiner in the ways that matter: it gives the topic, times the preparation minute, stays silent during your long turn, stops you near two minutes, and asks rounding off and Part 3 questions. It will not coach you, feed you vocabulary, or tell you your band during the session. The difference is that afterwards you get a transcript backed scorecard naming the exact bullet you skipped and the moment your fluency or grammar broke, which a real examiner never provides.

Scoring mirrors the public band descriptors. The four criteria each carry equal weight and a Band 8 needs consistent Band 8 across all four, because the criterion bands are averaged and one weak area pulls the result down. The scorecard breaks down topic development, discourse organisation, vocabulary range, grammatical control and intelligibility, and it flags observable behaviours such as a skipped bullet, an early stop, or a memorised cadence rather than judging your accent.

Jot keywords, not full sentences. Put one or two keywords against each of the four bullets: who the person is, how you met, what you dislike, and why you stay friends. Note one concrete episode you can tell as a short story and one or two natural idioms you can use accurately. Do not write a script, because reading a script aloud produces flat memorised delivery that the examiner detects and that caps fluency and coherence.

Stay specific and behavioural rather than insulting. Name one or two observable habits, for example that the person interrupts or checks their phone while others are speaking, and attach how it makes you feel. Then balance it by acknowledging what you value in them, which sets up the final bullet about why you are still friends. This keeps you on the card, shows lexical precision through personality vocabulary, and lets you finish with a genuine reflective close.

It opens by paraphrasing the topic, names the person and when you met within the first fifteen seconds, develops one concrete episode with reasons and feelings, uses relationship idioms such as we hit it off or part and parcel naturally rather than forced, moves smoothly between past, present and future tenses, signposts with discourse markers, and ends on a reflective sentence. Hesitation, if any, is to find an idea rather than to search for a word, and self correction is rare.

Falling silent is the single most damaging Part 2 failure for fluency and coherence. If you feel yourself running dry, extend the bullet you are on with a specific example, a contrast, or how the situation made you feel, rather than stopping. In this practice the examiner may give one neutral prompt asking if there is anything else to add, but it will not supply content, so the recovery has to come from you developing your own ideas.

Immediately after the long turn the examiner asks one or two short rounding off questions on the same topic, such as whether you think you will stay friends with this person in the future. Then it moves to abstract Part 3 discussion: what qualities make a good friend, whether it is possible to stay friends with someone whose behaviour you dislike, how friendships change between childhood and adulthood, and whether social media has made friendships stronger or weaker.

Examiners are trained to detect memorised answers, which sound too evenly paced and have grammar that collapses under an unscripted prompt. When the delivery sounds rehearsed the examiner deliberately redirects with something off script, for example asking about a specific disagreement you had with this friend, to see whether you can still produce natural, accurate, connected speech. Handling that redirect with fluent, specific language is exactly what separates a real Band 8 from a coached Band 6.5.