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Learn how to use storytelling and vivid description to make your IELTS Speaking Part 2 answers memorable, personal, and band-worthy.
Toey
Examiner-informed17/09/2026
Most candidates preparing for IELTS Speaking Part 2 make the same mistake: they treat it like a memory test. They memorise a list of facts about a person, a place, or an object, then recite those facts for two minutes. The examiner has heard it hundreds of times. It sounds rehearsed. It scores accordingly.
What actually works — and what the official IELTS scoring criteria reward — is something closer to storytelling. This post is about exactly how to do that.
Before we talk technique, it helps to understand the four criteria your Speaking score is built on: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation. These apply across all three parts of the Speaking test, but Part 2 is where Fluency and Coherence do the heaviest lifting.
Fluency here does not mean speaking fast. It means speaking without unnatural hesitation — without stopping to mentally translate, without repeatedly losing your thread. Coherence means your ideas connect. A story, by its very nature, is coherent: it has a beginning, a middle, and a point. A list of facts is not coherent — it is just sequential.
This is the structural reason storytelling works: it gives your answer a shape that the examiner can follow without effort, which is exactly what coherence means in practice.
You get one minute to prepare before you speak. Most candidates use it to jot down every fact they can think of. That approach produces answers that feel like Wikipedia entries.
Instead, use that minute to find your anchor moment — a single specific memory, scene, or feeling that your whole answer will orbit around. If the cue card asks you to describe a place you have visited, do not list every attraction. Pick the one moment that made the trip real for you: the smell of street food at dusk, the argument you had trying to read a map, the unexpected conversation with a stranger.
That anchor moment does three things simultaneously. It gives you something genuine to say (which keeps your fluency natural). It forces you to use specific, vivid vocabulary (which lifts your Lexical Resource score). And it makes your answer different from the forty other answers the examiner heard that week.
A two-minute monologue needs a skeleton, but not a rigid script. The skeleton I find most reliable has three movements:
Set the scene — where you were, when, who was with you, what the circumstances were. This takes about 20–30 seconds and grounds the examiner in your world.
Develop the moment — what actually happened, what you noticed, what you felt. This is the core of your two minutes and where your storytelling does the real work.
Reflect — why it mattered, what it changed, what you still think about it. This is where higher-band candidates separate themselves, because reflection requires complex sentence structures and abstract vocabulary naturally.
Notice that this maps onto the cue card's bullet points without slavishly following them. The card might ask who you were with, where you went, what you did, and explain why it was memorable. Your story answers all four — but in a way that feels lived-in rather than ticked off.
A common misconception is that vivid description means loading your sentences with adjectives. It does not. Vividness comes from specificity.
Compare these two sentences:
It was a beautiful old market in a foreign city.
versus:
The stalls were so close together that you had to turn sideways to pass, and every few metres someone was frying something in oil that smelled of garlic and cumin.
The second sentence has no adjectives doing decorative work. It has specific detail — turn sideways, every few metres, garlic and cumin — that puts the examiner inside the scene. That specificity is what the Lexical Resource criterion rewards: precise, context-appropriate word choice, not a thesaurus.
When you practise Part 2 topics, train yourself to ask: what exactly did I see, hear, smell, or feel? The answers to those questions are your vocabulary.
Some candidates worry: what if I have never visited an interesting place, or I cannot think of a memorable person? The good news is that the examiner is not fact-checking your life. You are allowed to adapt real experiences, combine memories, or describe something you know well even if the details are slightly adjusted.
What you cannot do is sound like you are reading from a template. Examiners are trained to recognise formulaic answers, and a formulaic answer signals low Lexical Resource and low coherence — because the ideas are not genuinely connected, they are just slotted in.
The most practical fix: use first-person emotional language. Not performed emotion, but honest reaction.
I remember feeling completely out of my depth when I first arrived — I did not speak the language, I had missed my connecting bus, and I was standing in a square with no idea which direction to walk.
That sentence is honest, it is specific, and it uses a range of grammatical structures naturally (past continuous, past perfect, relative clause). It scores well not because it was engineered to score well, but because it is real.
I want to be direct about this: memorising model answers from YouTube or prep books is one of the most counterproductive things you can do for Part 2.
Here is why. The IELTS Speaking examiner is specifically trained to flag memorised responses. If an answer sounds rehearsed, the examiner is instructed to redirect the candidate or note it, and the Fluency and Coherence score drops — because a memorised answer, however grammatically polished, does not demonstrate real communicative ability.
More practically: you cannot memorise an answer for every possible cue card. There are hundreds of possible topics. What you can do is internalise a storytelling approach that works for any topic, because you are always drawing on your own experiences and your own language.
The goal is not to sound like a model answer. The goal is to sound like a thoughtful person telling a story they care about.
Part 2 ends and Part 3 begins almost immediately — the examiner will move you from your personal story into abstract discussion. Candidates who have told a genuine story in Part 2 have a natural advantage here: they can refer back to it.
Examiner: Do you think people today travel more than previous generations? Candidate: I think so, yes — even from my own experience, the trip I was just describing would have been almost impossible for my parents at my age. Budget airlines, online booking, translation apps — the infrastructure just did not exist.
That answer is coherent across the two parts of the test. It shows the examiner that you are thinking, not performing.
Two minutes feels both very long and very short depending on how prepared you are. If you run out of things to say at 90 seconds, it usually means your anchor moment was not specific enough — you described the surface of an experience rather than going inside it. If you are still mid-story when the examiner stops you, that is actually fine; it signals strong fluency.
Practise with a timer. Record yourself. Listen back not for grammar errors but for moments where your voice loses energy — those are the moments where you have left the story and started listing again.
Speaking Part 2 is the only moment in the entire IELTS test where you have uninterrupted time to show what you can do with English. Every other section is reactive — you answer questions, you respond to prompts. Here, you have the floor.
The candidates who use that time well are not the ones with the largest vocabulary or the most complex grammar. They are the ones who have something to say and say it with enough specificity and honesty that the examiner stays engaged.
That is what storytelling gives you: a reason to speak, and a way to be heard.
You can adapt or combine real experiences, but your answer should feel genuine rather than fabricated. Examiners are trained to spot rehearsed, template-style responses, which can lower your Fluency and Coherence score. Drawing on real memories — even loosely — keeps your language natural and your delivery convincing.
You should speak for the full two minutes. The examiner will stop you when time is up, so it is better to still be speaking than to finish early. Running out of content around 90 seconds usually means your anchor moment was not specific enough — going deeper into one experience is more effective than covering multiple topics.
Yes. IELTS examiners are trained to identify memorised responses, and a rehearsed-sounding answer can result in a lower Fluency and Coherence score. Instead of memorising specific answers, practise a storytelling structure you can apply to any topic using your own experiences.
Specific, precise vocabulary beats decorative adjectives. Describe exactly what you saw, heard, or felt — the more concrete the detail, the stronger your Lexical Resource score. Phrases like 'I was completely out of my depth' or 'every few metres' are more effective than vague words like 'very interesting' or 'really nice'.
Rather than listing every fact you can think of, use the minute to identify one specific memory or moment — your anchor — that your whole answer will build around. Jot down two or three sensory details connected to that moment. This gives your answer a coherent shape and keeps your language natural and personal.
Toey
Verified coachToey is an AI-powered IELTS & TOEIC prep platform. Our guides are written with examiner-informed criteria and tested against thousands of real practice attempts.
