Read, Then Speak

A written prompt with two or three bullet points, twenty seconds to prepare, then ninety seconds of speech. The bullet points are not decoration — they are a plan the test has written for you, and ignoring them is the most common way to lose coherence marks here.

The Facts


Time	90 seconds
Preparation time	20 seconds
How many per test	1
Subscore	Speaking
Adaptive	No
Scored as	Speaking criteria

What You See

A question asking you to talk about something that happened to you or to give an opinion, with two or three bullet points underneath it. Twenty seconds of preparation, then Record Now, then up to ninety seconds. The prompt stays on screen while you speak, so there is nothing to memorise.

Unlike Interactive Speaking, you can see the question the whole time. That removes the memory load entirely and turns this into a pure structure-and-fluency task.

Use the Bullet Points as the Structure

Each bullet is one chunk of the answer, roughly twenty-five to thirty seconds each. Answering them in order gives you a shape without you having to invent one under pressure.

Prompt and plan

Question: Talk about a gift that you gave to someone close to you.
Bullet 1: What was the gift, and who did you give it to? → open with the answer, no preamble.
Bullet 2: Why did you choose that particular gift? → the reason, plus one detail that makes it specific.
Bullet 3: How did the person react? → the story, and this is where you can spend your last thirty seconds.

Signposting the bullets out loud — "I chose it because…", "When she opened it…" — is the cheapest discourse coherence available anywhere on the test.

Why Specific Beats General

The Content criterion rewards development, and development means detail that could only be true of your answer. Two versions of the same idea:

General	Specific
I gave my mother a present for her birthday because she likes photos.	I made my mother a photo album for her sixtieth birthday, because she is impossible to buy for — whenever anyone asks, she says she does not need anything.
It took a long time to make.	Over about two months I collected photographs from my aunts and from old boxes at home, scanned them, and put them in order from her childhood to the present.
She was very happy.	She went quiet for a moment, which is not like her at all, and then went through it twice before saying anything.

None of the specific versions uses harder vocabulary. They are longer and more concrete, and that is what the criterion measures.

Common Mistakes

Ignoring the bullet points and giving a general opinion.
Spending the whole ninety seconds on the first bullet.
Opening with "That is an interesting question", which costs five seconds and earns nothing.
Stopping at forty seconds because the story is finished. Add a reflection: what you learned, whether you would do it again.
Reciting something prepared in advance, which breaks the rules and is audible.

How to Practise

Practise on prompts you have not seen. The skill is producing structure live, not delivering a polished answer.
Time each bullet: thirty seconds each, three bullets. Get used to what thirty seconds of your own speech feels like.
Record, then listen back for the moment the answer stops being specific. That moment is what to work on.
A prompt with bullets and a model answer is on the Speaking samples page.

Kirill O'Nayd, Duolingo English Test expert

Written by Kirill O'Nayd

English test expert and educator at TestSucceed, where he builds the Duolingo English Test practice tasks and mock tests and has spent years taking apart how computer-adaptive, AI-graded exams award their points. See all TestSucceed preparation materials.