Pronunciation

Pronunciation in IELTS is about being easy to understand. It is not about sounding British or American.

What the official criteria say

The official Speaking criteria document, read on 12 November 2026, describes pronunciation as the accurate and sustained use of a range of phonological features to convey meaning. In our words, the indicators are:

Chunking: dividing speech into meaningful groups of words.
Rhythm and linking: stress timing and joining sounds smoothly in connected speech.
Stress and intonation used to add meaning, such as emphasis and contrast.
Individual sounds and word stress, and how much effort the listener needs to understand them.
The overall effect of accent on intelligibility.

Read the last point carefully. An accent is judged only by its effect on being understood. An Indian accent that is clear loses nothing.

Chunking

Speech is easier to follow when it comes in groups of words with a tiny pause between groups.

Hard to follow: "Last year I went to Jaipur with my family for five days and we saw many forts" said in one breath, on one note.

Chunked: "Last year / I went to Jaipur with my family / for five days / and we saw many forts."

Word stress

English words of more than one syllable have one strong syllable. Stressing the wrong one can make a word hard to recognise. Some that often go wrong: de-VEL-op (not DE-vel-op), ho-TEL, e-VENT, com-PU-ter, im-POR-tant, PHO-to-graph but pho-TOG-ra-pher, e-CON-o-my but e-co-NOM-ic.

Sentence stress

In a sentence, the words that carry the meaning, nouns, main verbs, adjectives, are stronger; small words such as "a", "of", "to" and "was" are weak and quick. "I WENT to the MARKet to BUY some FRUIT." Giving every word equal weight, common among Indian speakers, makes speech sound flat and is tiring to listen to.

Intonation

The voice falls at the end of a statement and of a question that begins with a question word: "Where do you LIVE?" It rises for yes or no questions: "Do you live HERE?" Use a stronger stress for contrast: "I like tea, but I LOVE coffee."

Sounds to check

Pair	Examples	Point
v and w	vest, west; vine, wine	For v the top teeth touch the lower lip. For w the lips are rounded and nothing touches.
s, z and "zh"	price, prize; measure, pleasure	z is voiced. The middle sound of "measure" is not "j".
short and long vowels	ship, sheep; full, fool	Length changes the word.
th sounds	thin, then	The tongue comes lightly between the teeth; they are not "t" and "d".
final consonants	walked, asked, months	Do not drop the endings or add a vowel between consonants.

Do not imitate an accent

A put-on accent is hard to keep up, and when it slips, speech becomes less clear, not more. Work on clarity in your own voice.

Practice

Record yourself reading a short paragraph. Mark where you paused. Were the pauses between groups of meaning?
Check the stress of new words in a dictionary that marks it or plays the sound.
Listen to a clear speaker and repeat one sentence at a time, copying the stressed words.
Ask someone to tell you which of your words they did not catch. Those are the ones to practise.

Speaking Part 1: practice questions All speaking pages

Independent practice site. IELTS Practice is not connected with, approved by or endorsed by the British Council, IDP IELTS or Cambridge University Press & Assessment, who jointly own IELTS. The practice tasks and sample answers here are our own; they are not official test questions, and we do not award bands. Facts about the test were read on ielts.org on 12 November 2026. For registration, fees, dates and official sample tests, go to ielts.org.