Talking about a Personal Experience

How the task works

Tell a story from your own life on a given theme. Thirty seconds to prepare, sixty to speak.

The rater wants a specific occasion, not a general habit.

Strategy that works

• Pick one occasion with a beginning, a middle and an end.
• Past tenses throughout, and say when it happened in the first sentence.
• Spend the last ten seconds on why it mattered to you.
• Small true detail sells the story better than a dramatic invented one.

What costs marks

• Drifting into the general present: "usually I go to..."
• Choosing an event so complicated it needs forty seconds of background.
• Stopping dead at the end of the story with twenty seconds left.

Practise it

Worked examples of this task, with answers and explanations, are on the CELPIP speaking samples page. The rest of the section is set out on the CELPIP speaking description page.

Common questions