CAE Speaking Marking Criteria

To ensure you get top marks in the exam, you should learn how the examiners mark your speaking paper.

For the Speaking paper, there are 6 main criteria, marked on a scale of 0-5 (0 being the worst and 5 the best).

Here is a brief summary of the 6 speaking marking criteria:

Grammatical Resource: the grammar you use

Lexical Resource: the vocabulary you use

Discourse Management: how appropriate your ideas are, the clarity and speed of your speech and how well you link your ideas together

Pronunciation: how easy it is to understand you, how appropriate your intonation, word stress and sentence stress are.

Interactive Communication: how well you interact with the other candidate, link to their ideas, add to the conversation and your ability to negotiate.

The 5 criteria above are doubled in order to calculate your total exam score. However, there is one more criterion…

Global Achievement: how well you communicate on a variety of common and less common topics. The language you use to express your ideas and speak coherently and at length.

This criterion is again marked on a 0-5 scale and then multiplied by 5 and added to the total marks for the other 5 criteria.

I recommend having a read of this really useful pdf document which talks about these criteria in more detail and shows you what examiners expect to hear in order to get ‘5’ or top marks in the speaking paper. There are also some exercises which will be really useful to complete: https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/images/168620-assessing-speaking-performance-at-level-c1.pdf

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