Practising for A2 Flyers Speaking Test Part 4

In the final part (Part 4) of the A2 Flyers Speaking Test, candidates are asked to answer questions on a topic.

The topic

This part starts with the examiner saying: Now, let’s talk about ... . For example: Now, let’s talk about what you do at the weekends. The questions will all be related to this topic.

There are twenty topics listed on the Cambridge Young Learners Topic list.

Animals, the body and face, clothes, colours, family and friends, food and drink, health, the home, materials, names, numbers, places and directions, school, sports and leisure, time, toys, transport, weather, work, the world around us.

I wouldn’t expect questions about health in this part of the speaking test and names and numbers would probably feature in candidates’ answers rather than being a separate topic. Most of the other topics could definitely be the focus of the Now, let’s talk about … questions.

4 questions

There are four questions in this part, all related to the topic.

What time do you get up on Saturday?

What do you do on Saturday afternoon?

Where do you have lunch on Sunday?

Who do you play with at the weekend?

As you can see, there’s a range of Wh- questions.

Those tricky wh-words!! Candidates often misunderstand the questions – for example, here, they may well answer the question: Where do you have lunch on Sunday? with ‘At two o’clock.’ because they understand ‘When’ instead of ‘Where’.

This is so easy to do, because the question word comes right at the beginning of the question, so it’s easy to miss!

This is why it’s so important to practise question words A LOT!

Tip

In real life, when we’re not sure if we’ve understood a question, we very often check before we answer – so why not get learners to do this too!

When do I have lunch, or Where?

Tell me about ..

After the four questions, candidates are then asked to say more things related to the topic. In this case, this could be:

Tell me about other things you do at the weekend.

Tell me about your favourite things to do at the weekend.

Tell me about your favourite places to go at the weekend.

Tip

As I said in an earlier post about personal questions in speaking tests, my advice is to train learners to say three things in answer to questions about themselves.

To do this, learners can talk about the past – e.g. what they did last weekend, the present – e.g. what they usually do at the weekend, and the future – what they are going to do next weekend or soon.

Free resource!

To practise for this part of the A2 Flyers Speaking Test, I’ve prepared a worksheet. I’ve taken four themes and jumbled up the four questions. Learners match the questions to the topic.

When they do this, ask them to think about the logical order of the questions too.

Now, let’s talk about birthdays. The first question of the four will be: When’s your birthday?

For the other three topics, the order could be pretty much any order.

If you’d like a copy of the worksheet, follow this link.

And you have the Key to the worksheet here.

Suggested Tell me questions

I haven’t added Tell me questions to the handout. For the four topics here, Tell me questions could be:

Birthdays

Tell me about your last birthday. Tell me about what you like to do at parties.

Mornings

Tell me about your morning at school. / Tell me about your mornings at the weekend/during the holidays.

Food

Tell me about dinner/breakfast time in your house. Tell me about your favourite restaurant. Tell me about your favourite meal.

Clothes

Tell me about your favourite clothes. Tell me about the clothes you wear on holiday. Tell me about your favourite clothes shop.