Part 2 · Long turn

IELTS Part 2: A Time Budget for Filling the Full Two Minutes

Running out of things to say in Part 2 is almost never a shortage of ideas. It's a distribution problem — you spend everything you have in the first forty seconds, then stand there with nothing left and ninety seconds on the clock. The fix isn't more ideas. It's rationing the ones you already have.

Two minutes is more words than you think

At a natural speaking rate — roughly 130 to 160 words per minute — two minutes is about 260 to 320 words. Most candidates who feel they've spoken at length have produced around 120 and stopped just past the one-minute mark.

That number is worth internalising, because "speak for two minutes" is an abstract instruction and "produce roughly 300 words" is a concrete one you can check. Record one practice answer, transcribe it, count. The gap is usually startling.

The front-loading mistake

Given a cue card about a memorable trip, the instinct is to answer the question immediately and completely: where it was, who you went with, when, and why it was memorable — all inside thirty seconds. Every bullet point covered, efficiently.

And now you're done. There's nothing left, because you treated the cue card as a questionnaire to be completed rather than a topic to be explored. The bullets aren't a form. They're four different directions you could travel in, and you just sprinted down all of them at once.

Efficiency is the wrong instinct here. Part 2 rewards development.

A budget for the two minutes

The 0:50–1:30 block is where most answers die. Candidates finish the events and assume the answer is over — but the events are the least interesting and least scoreable part. Your reaction to them is where complex structures live: "which was surprising because…", "I hadn't expected it to…", "if I'd known, I would have…". That's Grammatical Range and Lexical Resource evidence, and it only appears when you slow down.

Use the preparation minute for anchors, not sentences

Writing full sentences during the one-minute prep is a trap for two reasons: you can't write fast enough to produce more than two of them, and once written, you'll read them aloud — which sounds rehearsed and flattens your delivery.

Write four or five single nouns instead. For a memorable trip that might be: Kyoto · rain · temple · grandmother · photo. Each word is an anchor you can expand from for twenty to thirty seconds, and crucially each is a different direction — a place, a condition, a location, a person, an object. Five anchors at twenty-five seconds each is your two minutes, with margin.

If you find yourself writing more than about eight words during the prep minute, you're scripting rather than planning.

When you go blank at seventy seconds

It will happen. What matters is that the gap stays short — a two-second pause costs you almost nothing, an eight-second one is very visible. Three reliable moves:

• Go sensory. Describe what you could see, hear, or smell. This is always available, requires no new ideas, and produces natural descriptive vocabulary.
• Go comparative. "It was quite different from…" — contrast generates content indefinitely and pulls in comparative structures.
• Take the next unused bullet. This is what the bullets are actually for: a safety net when you stall, not a checklist to complete up front.

Why stopping early costs more than rambling

Candidates stop early because they'd rather say something polished and finish than keep going and risk a mistake. Understandable, and backwards.

Finishing at fifty seconds signals underdevelopment against Fluency & Coherence, and — more damagingly — it removes the evidence the examiner needs to award you anything for range. They can only score the language you actually produced. Fifty seconds of careful English gives them a very small sample, and a small sample can't demonstrate a wide range of structures or vocabulary.

A slightly rambling two minutes beats a polished fifty seconds almost every time. If the examiner stops you at 2:00, that's the ideal outcome, not a failure.

Practising this in BandLift