A survey of over 500 Japanese people who have English tutors found that “giving good feedback” was the factor most likely to give students the impression that someone is “a good tutor.”

As we already know, some students prefer not to be corrected too often. But even they appreciate tips on how to improve. So whether we’re giving on-the-spot corrections or end-of-lesson feedback, let’s make sure to leave a good impression!

This time, we’ll look at how to make our feedback more professional with the IELTS Speaking criteria. You’ll not only become more familiar with an exam that many students take, but also learn a way to structure your feedback so it’s more targeted and helpful.

IELTS Speaking 101

The IELTS Speaking test assesses candidates on the following four criteria: 

1. Fluency and coherence
2. Lexical resource (which we’ll break up into “vocabulary” and “paraphrase”)
3. Grammatical accuracy and range (which we’ll simply call “grammar”)
4. Pronunciation

Each of these criteria is graded on a scale of 1 to 9, and the descriptions of what each score entails can give us plenty of ideas for our own feedback.

For this post, we’ll go over three of these criteria — vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar — particularly as they apply to intermediates (i.e. the majority of our students).

Vocabulary

We all know to point out incorrect word choice. But aside from that, how can we gauge a student’s vocabulary level?

Two useful criteria IELTS uses are:

1. Does the speaker have enough vocabulary to “talk about familiar and unfamiliar topics”?
2. Does the speaker have enough vocabulary to “discuss topics at length”?

For example, let’s say you’re having a free conversation lesson with a student who is a doctor. You can see if they can discuss their job “at length” by:

• asking in-depth questions about their work (without prying, of course!) 
• asking about more abstract sides of the job (e.g. “What do you think is the most important quality for a doctor to have?” “What are your thoughts on alternative forms of medicine?”)

To see if they can talk about unfamiliar topics, ask them about things unrelated to the medical field and then discuss how they did at the end of the lesson. To give you a sense of what vocabulary-related feedback you can give, here are the criteria from the IELTS framework:

For example, you might tell the student, “You clearly have enough vocabulary to “talk about familiar topics like your job, but will need to expand it in order to be able to talk about unfamiliar topics, too” or “You need to learn more vocabulary to be able to talk about your job in detail.”

Pronunciation

It should come as no surprise that pronunciation is assessed on a speaking test. However, pronunciation here doesn’t mean accent. Test-takers don’t get higher scores for speaking with an American or British accent. Other accents are equally acceptable as long as they don’t affect intelligibility — the main thing IELTS looks for.

For example, notice that a score of “Band 2” indicates that someone is “often unintelligible,” a Band 9 indicates that someone is “effortless to understand,” and the bands in between represent different levels of intelligibility:

Aspects of pronunciation that are important to intelligibility include:

• proper production of the basic sounds of English (especially these vowels and consonants)
• division of sentences into meaningful groups of words (and knowing where to place stress within those groups)
• rhythm

So when you give pronunciation-related feedback to a student at the end of the lesson, you can first mention how intelligible they were (e.g. “Your English is easy to understand”) and then specify what they could do better (e.g. “you’ll want to work on dividing your speech into word groups to make yourself easier to follow”).

Grammar

Grammar is important to doing well on any standardized test, and IELTS is no exception. However, you’ll notice that similar to pronunciation, it’s most important to focus on grammatical mistakes that cause comprehension problems. You can see that “comprehension problems” are mentioned in descriptions in Bands 4 to 6:

Here are some examples of grammar mistakes that could cause comprehension problems depending on the context:

• Confusion of -ed and -ing (e.g. when a student says “I’m amazing” instead of “I’m amazed”)
• Confusion of adverbs and adjectives (e.g. when a student says “I worked hardly for the test” instead of “I worked hard for the test.”

We’ll also want to take note of errors the student consistently makes. For example, if they say things like, “I went school” or “I go mall with my friends,” we’ll definitely want to point out that they’re leaving out the preposition “to.”

However, keep in mind that grammar has less of an impact on communication than most teachers realize. As a report by Cambridge University explains, “Communication problems ... are more likely to be caused by vocabulary and pronunciation issues ... so there may be a strong case for focusing on these more than on grammar.”

In other words, if your student is preparing for a standardized test, be strict with grammar. By higher levels, they should be able to produce “a majority of error-free sentences.” 

However, if their goal is communication, focus more on vocabulary and pronunciation and introduce grammar when it helps students form more complex sentences. For example, if a student says “I think our company should hire more writers. We need to make more content,” we could suggest they say, “I think our company should hire more writers so we can make more content.”

📌 Takeaways

If you thoroughly cover vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar, you’ll be providing the kind of feedback that most of our students want. 

For your convenience, here’s a chart that sums up the main points in each category:

And if this has sparked your interest in preparing students for the IELTS, we recommend you check our IELTS materials and the IELTS Teacher Training Program. Happy tutoring!