IELTS Speaking: Pronunciation
A quarter of the band, and the one candidates most often assume they cannot change. It is marked on how easily a listener can understand you — not on having a British or American accent, which is stated plainly in the public descriptors.
What is actually marked
- Individual sounds — whether the sounds you produce distinguish the words you mean.
- Word stress — the wrong syllable stressed makes a known word unrecognisable.
- Sentence stress and rhythm — which words you lean on, which carries meaning.
- Intonation — rising and falling, which signals a question, a list, a contrast.
Of these, word and sentence stress do the most damage when wrong and are the most trainable. A candidate with every sound slightly non-native but correct stress is easy to follow; the reverse is not.
Practical gains
- Check the stress of the words you will certainly use — your job, your subject, your city.
- Record two minutes of yourself and listen for words you cannot identify without the transcript.
- Slow down slightly. Speed is not fluency, and it is the main cause of lost endings.
- Pronounce word endings — plural and past-tense endings carry grammar, so dropping them costs twice.
Accent is explicitly not penalised. An Indian, Nigerian or Filipino accent is not a deduction; being hard to follow is, whatever the accent.
Pronunciation — FAQs
2 questions
No. The criterion is intelligibility, and clear speech in any accent scores well.
Word stress and sentence endings can, and those are the two with the largest effect on being understood.
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Written from the test board's own published material and checked on 1 October 2026.