Fluency & Coherence Criterion

Warm-up: What your pauses are made of

2 warm-up questions

• When you speak English, what actually causes your pauses — searching for a word, building the grammar, or deciding what you think?
• First try, 30 seconds: do you think people have enough free time these days? Answer now.

Reading: What Examiners Look For

Read a 143-word text about What Examiners Look For

Fluency & Coherence: What Examiners Look For This criterion assesses how smoothly you speak and how well you organize your ideas. It accounts for 25% of your Speaking score. Fluency means: Speaking at a consistent, natural pace Not hesitating too frequently Not having long, uncomfortable pauses Self-correcting smoothly when needed Coherence means: Organizing ideas logically Using linking words appropriately Staying on topic Making your ideas easy to follow Band Descriptors: Band 5-6: Willing to speak at length but with noticeable hesitation Uses some connectors but not always appropriately May lose coherence when trying to explain complex ideas Band 7: Speaks at length without obvious effort Uses a range of connectors and discourse markers flexibly May demonstrate language-related hesitation occasionally or self-correction Band 8-9: Speaks fluently with only rare repetition or self-correction Any hesitation is content-related rather than language-related Develops topics coherently and appropriately

Vocabulary: Discourse Markers for Coherence

6 items

Reading: Hearing the criterion: the same answer at two bands

Read a 360-word text about Hearing the criterion: the same answer at two bands

Hearing the criterion: the same answer at two bands Band descriptors only become useful when you can hear them. Here is one Part 3 question answered twice — read both aloud, hesitations included. The band labels are calibrated styles, not official scores. The question: "Do you think people have enough free time these days?" The Band 5-6 style answer "Um… I think no. People are very busy because… er… the work is too much. And also… you know… the phone. People look at the phone many hours. So… um… they have free time but… how to say… they don't use it good. So no, not enough." The Band 7+ style answer "On the whole, I'd say people have more free time than they think — it just doesn't feel that way. The main culprit is how we spend it: those spare twenty minutes get swallowed by scrolling, so the time never feels like rest. Take my own evenings, for example — technically I'm free after seven, but if I spend that time on my phone, I end the day feeling I had no time at all. So for me the real issue isn't the amount of free time; it's the quality of it." Key differences — this is what the descriptors mean "Speaks at length without noticeable effort": the second answer flows in connected sentences; the first stalls every few words ("er…", "how to say…"). "Uses a range of connectors and discourse markers flexibly": "on the whole", "the main culprit", "take… for example", "so for me" — each link is different and each does a real job. The first answer has only "and also" and "so". Hesitation type: at Band 7+, pauses happen while choosing ideas, not while searching for words. Every pause in the first answer is a language search. "Develops topics coherently": the second answer has an arc — claim, cause, example, reframed conclusion. The first circles the same point and ends where it began. One more thing worth hearing: the Band 7+ answer contains zero rare words. Fluency and coherence are about FLOW and SHAPE — you can reach Band 7 on this criterion with simple vocabulary.

Practice: Improving Coherence

Error-correction exercise, 5 items

• I like my job. It's stressful. I want to stay.
• Um... so... like... I think... maybe... technology is... um... good.
• First I want to talk about education and also health is important and then the economy.
• So basically what I mean is that like in my opinion I think that...
• The food was good. The weather was nice. The people were friendly. I enjoyed it.

Discussion: Your mission: flow without fillers

3 discussion questions

• Mission: answer the warm-up question again — 'Do people have enough free time?' — for 45 seconds. Success = at least four DIFFERENT discourse markers doing real work, no filler chains ('um… you know… like…'), and a shaped answer: claim, reason, example, conclusion. (Tutor: re-tally hesitations and connectors, then show both scorecards side by side.)
• Second take: explain step-by-step how to prepare your favourite dish — with zero fillers. Pausing silently is allowed; 'um' is not. Where did the urge to fill silence come from?
• Compare your two tallies. Are your hesitations word-searching or idea-choosing — and what's your one fluency habit to drill before test day?