Speaking
Describe something you enjoyed doing as a child is one of the cue cards candidates meet most often, and it is a generous one, because childhood invites narrative and narrative is easier to sustain for two minutes than description. The model answer below runs the full two minutes, moves through three tenses, and finishes on the evaluation the final line of the card asks for.
Describe something you enjoyed doing as a child
You should say:
and explain why you enjoyed doing it.
Before you read any further, do the task properly. One minute of notes, two minutes of speaking, recorded. A model answer is far more useful once you have produced your own and can hear the difference.
Read this aloud once you have recorded your own attempt, ideally recording the model as well. Listen back to both and compare your pace and your intonation rather than your vocabulary. The gap is usually smaller than candidates expect on words and larger than they expect on delivery.
The thing I enjoyed more than anything else as a child, certainly from about the age of six onwards, was riding bikes. I had a new or second-hand bike every year or so and they got faster and larger as I grew. I can still remember the first one having stabilisers on the back so that I did not fall off while I was learning.
As I got a little older, around ten, I started going out on the bike with friends most weekends and in the evenings, and I cycled to school as well — we would call at each other's houses and ride in as a group. The best of it was when I was fourteen and three of us went away overnight with a tent strapped to the back of one of the bikes. It felt like an enormous adventure at the time. We must have covered sixty kilometres that weekend, and we camped in a field and stayed up far later than we should have. The only real problem was that one of them came off his bike and damaged it badly enough that his parents had to drive out and collect him.
For my fifteenth birthday I was given a bike with fifteen gears, which was quite unusual then and considerably faster than anything my friends had, so I started going out on my own a good deal more. Later on I got a job delivering newspapers, which meant I was on it every morning as well.
I stopped when I was about eighteen and I have never really gone back to it, although I probably should — it is very good for you and it costs almost nothing. What puts me off is the traffic. Drivers do not always look out for bikes, and I am not sure I could enjoy it now the way I did then, when the roads were emptier and nobody worried about where I was.
Mostly I loved it because it got me out of the house and gave me a bit of independence at an age when you have almost none. There was a social side to it too — all my friends had bikes, so it was never something I did on my own.
There is no preamble and no restating of the card. The first clause commits to a topic and starts supplying detail, which means the fluency clock never has to be recovered.
Six, ten, fourteen, fifteen, eighteen. Those markers do two things: they organise the answer chronologically so it never wanders, and they force a variety of past forms.
The overnight camping trip is a self-contained narrative with a complication at the end. A single anecdote will happily fill forty seconds and is far easier to produce under pressure than a list of general statements.
The fourth paragraph moves to why the speaker no longer cycles, which supplies present tenses, a modal of obligation and a hypothetical. Cue cards about the past are the easiest place to demonstrate grammatical range, provided you do not stay in the past for the full two minutes.
Take the structures, not the content. An answer copied wholesale is audible within a sentence, and examiners hear memorised material constantly. These patterns can be attached to anything.
Describe a game you played as a child.
and say whether children still play it.
Describe a place you often went to as a child.
and explain why you remember it.
Describe a toy or possession you loved when you were young.
and say what happened to it.
Describe something you learned to do when you were young.
and say whether you can still do it.
Quick question, 10 seconds
Where do you want to study or move to?
When are you planning to go?
How far along are you?
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