Fifteen minutes, four parts, two candidates. Nothing here is scored, because a page cannot hear you. Record each part on this device, play it back against the model, and say it better — that is the whole method, and it is the only one that moves the Speaking mark.
The interlocutor asks each of you a few questions in turn. Answers are short — two or three sentences — but never one word. This part is not assessed heavily; it is where the examiners tune their ear to your voice, so speak up and do not warm up slowly.
Question 2, at the top of the band — about 25 seconds.
“Bread, of all things. I'd assumed it was one of those hobbies people take up in order to photograph, and I only started because a neighbour gave me some of her starter and it seemed rude to let it die. What I hadn't expected was how much of it is waiting. You can't hurry any part of it, and I've turned out to find that oddly restful rather than frustrating — which tells you something about the rest of my week, probably.”
Why this scores. It names one concrete thing in the first two words. It gives the expectation and then the reversal, which is what the question asked for. It contains a genuine C1 structure used because the sentence needed it — What I hadn't expected was… — and it ends on a small piece of self-observation rather than trailing off. Three sentences. It does not go on.
You are each given three photographs and asked to talk about two of them for a minute. There are two questions printed above the pictures and you must answer both — this is not a description task. When your partner has finished, you are asked a short question about their pictures and you have about thirty seconds. The photographs are described in words here.
Candidate A — three photographs of people waiting.
1 A crowded hospital corridor: a dozen people on plastic chairs, a woman holding a folder, nobody talking, a clock high on the wall.
2 A family on a station platform in the rain, luggage stacked, a small boy at the very edge of the yellow line looking down the empty track.
3 Two people outside an examination hall, one reading notes very fast, the other looking at nothing at all.
Candidate B — three photographs of people teaching something to somebody.
1 An older man in a workshop guiding a teenager's hands on a chisel; neither of them is looking at the other.
2 A lecture theatre seen from the back, two hundred students, a speaker very small at the front, most screens open on something else.
3 A woman at a kitchen table showing an elderly neighbour how to use a phone; the phone is in the neighbour's hand, not hers.
Candidate A's long turn, pictures 1 and 3, at the top of the band — about 60 seconds.
“I'll take the hospital corridor and the two outside the exam hall. What strikes me about both is that the waiting is entirely out of the hands of the people doing it, which I imagine is the hardest kind. In the corridor there's a clock on the wall, and I'd guess it's the worst object in the room — it measures something they can't influence. Nobody's talking, which suggests they've been there long enough to have stopped.
The exam hall is different in one important respect: the waiting has an end they know the time of. That ought to make it easier, and yet the two of them seem to be dealing with it in opposite ways — one is cramming, which is almost certainly useless by that stage but at least occupies the hands, while the other has given up on that entirely. If I had to choose, I'd say the corridor is worse, because uncertainty about when is harder to bear than dread about what.”
Why this scores. It answers both questions and it compares rather than describes. It speculates in every sentence — I imagine, I'd guess, which suggests, almost certainly — which is precisely what the task asks for. It picks two small details (the clock, the two different reactions) and builds the whole turn on them, instead of inventorying everything in the frame. And it ends with a judgement, which gives the examiner something to hear as a conclusion rather than as running out.
You are given a written prompt with a question in the middle and five options around it. You talk together for about two minutes about the options; then the interlocutor asks you to decide something, and you have one minute to reach agreement. It is a conversation, not two speeches — and the decision minute is assessed on whether you actually negotiate.
Here are some things a city could do to make people feel that a museum belongs to them.
· open it late one evening a week
· let local people choose one object to display each month
· employ guides who grew up in the city
· remove all the labels and provide people instead
· hold school lessons in the galleries rather than in classrooms
First (2 minutes): talk to each other about how effective each of these might be at making people feel a museum belongs to them.
Then (1 minute): decide which two of them a museum should try first if it can only afford two.
Forty seconds from the middle of a strong collaborative turn.
A: “Removing the labels is the one I keep coming back to, because it changes what a museum is rather than just who is invited into it. Although — that would depend entirely on there being enough people, wouldn't it. What do you think?”
B: “That's exactly where I stall on it. It's the most ambitious idea on the list and the least affordable, which makes me suspicious of my own enthusiasm for it. I'd have thought the local guides do a good deal of the same work for a fraction of the cost.”
A: “Go on — why is a guide who grew up here different from any other guide?”
B: “Because they're evidence. You can be told a museum is for you; it's quite another thing to be told it by somebody from three streets away. I'd say that's the strongest item here, actually — I hadn't thought so at the start.”
A: “No, that's persuaded me. Shall we put that one first and argue about the second?”
Why this scores. Every turn is short. Each one does something to the other person's point — extends it, resists it, asks for more — rather than beginning a new topic. Both candidates hedge and then commit (I'd have thought · I'd say that's the strongest item), and B openly changes position, which is worth more than defending a first opinion. The last line moves the pair towards the decision without cutting the discussion off.
The interlocutor asks broader questions arising from Part 3. This is the longest part, it is the most abstract, and it is where C1 is genuinely tested: you are being asked to hold a position, qualify it, and defend it against a counter-argument — sometimes your partner's, sometimes the examiner's.
Question 2, at the top of the band — about 45 seconds.
“I'd keep them free, and I'd accept the consequence, which I don't think is a small one. If free entry means twelve national museums instead of eighteen, then six collections go into storage and a generation doesn't see them, and anybody who pretends that's costless is not being straight about it.
But charging changes something at the door that is very hard to change back. The moment there is a price, going in becomes a decision you have to justify to yourself, and the people who stop justifying it are precisely the ones the museum most needs to reach. A closed museum can be reopened; a habit of not going, once it's formed in a family, tends to last two or three generations. So I'd take fewer institutions that anybody may walk into over more that some people would have to think twice about — while accepting that I'm choosing, and not pretending the choice is obvious.”
Why this scores. It answers in the first four words and never wavers from that position. It states the cost of its own view honestly instead of arguing as though the trade-off were not real — which is what the question was testing. The language is doing work: a cleft, a concessive, a comparative built across two clauses. And it ends by naming its own argument as a choice, which is the difference between an opinion and a position.
The one habit to take from this. At C1 you are not rewarded for balance. You are rewarded for a position that has been through the counter-argument and come out the other side. Say what you think, say what it costs, say why you'd pay it.
Play each part back once with the model in front of you, and listen for one thing only at a time. Listening for everything at once tells you nothing.
Pass 1 — did I answer the question that was asked? Pass 2 — did I develop, or did I stop? A C1 answer gives the point and then the reason, every time. Pass 3 — did I commit? Part 4 is marked on whether you can hold and defend a position, not on whether you can list both sides. Do the part again after each pass.