List of the Topics for Part Two IELTS Speaking Test

One of the challenging aspects of Part Two is the huge number of potential topics. Naturally with such a wide range of topics every candidate has certain topic areas that he or she is comfortable with and others that they find more difficult.
In the strategy section of this chapter hopefully this problem will be addressed, but first it is probably a good idea to look at the Part Two topics.
One important aspect to recognize is that many of the Part One topics are recycled as Part Two topics.
Examples:
Part One Topic                                  Part Two Topic
Restaurants                                         A restaurant
Reading                                                A book
Public transport                                  Form of public transport
TV                                                         TV programme
The sea                                                 A river, take, sea
Seasons                                                A season
Clothes                                                 An item of clothing
Photography                                       A photograph
Hobbies                                                A hobby
Sports                                                   A sport
Animals                                                An animal
Buildings                                              A building

This list could go on, but the main thing to realize is that most of the topic areas for Part Two are very similar to Part One. This is to your advantage because it means you can use Part One language in your Part Two.
There is no danger of repetition here because if you are given a certain topic in Part One you will NOT get the same topic in Part Two. So if the examiner asks you about "animals" in Part One, you will not get the Part Two topic "Describe an animal..."
Instead of making a huge list of Part Two topics it is easier to put all of the topics into groups or categories.
The most obvious categories are as follows:
  • Experiences / Past events
  • Objects / Material possessions
  • People
  • Places
  • Media related
  • Others (anything that doesn‘t fit into the 5 categories above.)
One of the advantages of grouping topics together is that when you look at the relationships between some of the topics you will see that it is in fact possible to use the same content for more than one topic card.
In this way you don't need to prepare a separate response for every topic card, you can reuse the same language for many different topics.
The individual topic cards are given later in this section.
There are a number of different ways to deal with Part Two and some are more effective than others.
From our earlier observations we can conclude that the best strategy is one which focuses directly on the features detailed in the marking system and produces as many of these features as possible in the 2-minute time Game.
One important area that is often neglected is the one minute preparation time. In my experience many candidates actually cause problems for themselves in the one-minute preparation time.

Activity
Look at the following topic card and make notes for one minute.
Describe an interesting building in your city.
You should say:
What the building looks like
What it is used for
Why it is interesting
How often you visit this building.
Most people write notes in the following way:
  • a  building / old
  • its very old
  • a library / books
  • once a month
What often happens is that most people write "answers" to the guidelines and prompts and usually those "answers" are in very simple language.
When Part Two begins people are focused on their notes - their notes contain basic answers to the prompts so the focus of their Part Two is basic answers in response to the prompts. Obviously, this is not an effective strategy.
At this early stage one effective strategy is to ignore the prompts altogether and use a simple Three-step Preparation Method.