Speaking (Professional and Financial Communication)
The Speaking domain tests spoken professional English in financial situations: describing charts and results, handling client calls, contributing opinions in meetings and summarising a short text or set of figures. Assessment covers fluency, pronunciation, vocabulary range, grammatical accuracy and interaction - turn-taking, clarifying and recovering when you do not know something.
Framing an answer
- Signpost the structure: "I'll cover three points: volumes, margins and outlook."
- For charts, give the overview first: "Overall, fee income rose steadily before flattening off."
- Then support with two or three key figures, each with unit and period.
Trend and data language
- Verbs: climb, edge up, surge, peak, plateau, level off, dip, slump, bottom out, recover.
- Adverbs: sharply, steadily, modestly, marginally, unexpectedly.
- Say numbers correctly: "four point two billion dollars", "two and a half percent", "a 6 percent increase year on year".
Interaction moves
- Clarify before answering: "When you say exposure, do you mean gross or net?"
- Buy time honestly: "Let me check that figure - I'll confirm by email today."
- Self-correct explicitly: "Sorry, I meant 4.5, not 4.2."
Worked example
Prompt: describe a chart of fee income from 2019 to 2023, peaking at 18 million in 2022 and flattening in 2023. Model: "Overall, fee income climbed steadily from 2019 to 2022, peaking at 18 million dollars, before flattening off in 2023." Reasoning: the overview comes first and uses past tense because the period is complete; "peaking at" attaches the figure to the right year; "before flattening off" links the two movements in one clean clause instead of reading each data point.
Traps that cost marks
- Reading every point on the chart with no overview or selection.
- Wrong tense: present for current policy or ongoing trends, past for completed periods.
- Saying "increase" when the data falls, or dropping the unit ("18" instead of "18 million dollars").
- Flat intonation on figures, making them hard to follow.
- Filling silence with "um" instead of a purposeful holding phrase.