Five untimed CELPIP Speaking Task 1 questions, each with a spoken model answer. Record yourself for your own ears, reveal the model, then read exactly how it is built: the structure, the phrases worth stealing and the mistakes it deliberately avoids.
Task 1 opens the speaking section by handing you somebody else's problem. A short written situation appears on the screen: your cousin is thinking about adopting a rescue dog, your co-worker wants to study part-time, your aunt retires next month and is afraid she will be bored. In every version, a named person with a stated relationship to you has asked for your advice, and the instruction is simply to give it.
The clock is 30 seconds to prepare and 90 seconds to record. The preparation is not skippable on the real test, and the recording starts on its own the instant the prep runs out, which is why walking in with a plan for those 30 seconds matters more here than anywhere else in the section. Ninety seconds is the longest response the test asks for, and it is worth knowing what that means in practice: roughly 200 to 230 words at a comfortable Canadian speaking pace.
Here is the thing candidates get wrong before they say a word. There is no correct advice. Nobody is checking whether adopting the dog is wise, and no rater has an opinion about part-time study. The problem exists purely as a surface for language, and the entire question is whether you can take a position, develop it, and sound like a person the listener would actually take advice from. That reframing is worth more than any list of tips: you are not solving the problem, you are demonstrating the machinery you use on problems.
The other thing built into every Task 1 prompt is a relationship. Not a generic "someone", but a cousin, a co-worker, a friend who arrived six months ago, an aunt. That word is not decoration. Tone is one of the four things Task Fulfillment explicitly scores, and the register you owe an aunt who is nervous about retiring is measurably different from the one you owe a colleague weighing a course load. Reading the prompt and missing the relationship is the quietest way to cap your band on this task.
The 2026 CELPIP speaking format for the advice task specifically.
Four criteria apply to every one of the eight tasks. What changes is which of them Task 1 puts under pressure, and it is not the ones most candidates prepare for.
Two of those deserve a longer word, because they are where most of the marks quietly move. The first is depth. The instinct under a 90 second clock is to reach for volume, and volume feels like content while you are producing it. It is not. A rater hearing eight tips hears eight sentences that could have been generated without reading the prompt, which is exactly the impression you do not want. A rater hearing three tips with a dollar figure, a named weekday and an awkward question to ask the shelter staff hears somebody who engaged with this situation and nobody else's.
The second is the ending. Ninety seconds is long, and a large share of otherwise decent answers spend the last 15 of them restating point one. There is nothing wrong with a summary in an essay, but in speech it is dead air with words in it. Give the last five seconds to something new and small: an extra low cost action, a personal offer, an encouragement. The model answers on this page all end that way, and none of them ends with "so those are my three pieces of advice".
Five people who have asked you what to do, and not one of them is owed the same tone. Open one, record yourself with no clock running, listen back, then reveal the spoken model answer and the reasoning underneath it. Your recording stays in your browser: it is never uploaded and nothing here is scored.
Your cousin has never had a pet and is thinking about adopting from a shelter. She wants to know what to think about first. The register is warm and direct, and the marks are in the logistics nobody mentions.
Practise this questionA co-worker wants to go back to school part-time and keep her job. Friendly but professional, and the hard part is the collision between two full-time commitments rather than the studying itself.
Practise this questionA friend who arrived six months ago is nervous about her first interview here. The prompt hands you one specific detail and an emotion, and generic interview advice throws both of them away.
Practise this questionYour aunt retires next month and is worried she will be bored. The hardest register on this page: warm, slightly deferential, and it has to name the fear the prompt names rather than listing hobbies.
Practise this questionYour neighbour has decided this is the year she finally learns to drive, and wants to know what to weigh first. There is nothing left to talk her into, so the marks move to advice with real dates in it, and to a close that answers the worry she never quite says out loud.
Practise this questionMost candidates use the prep to polish an opening sentence. Use it to pick three pieces of advice instead. The opening will arrive on its own; the third point will not, and that is the one you will be missing at second sixty.
"First ... second ... and this is the one I would push hardest on." Your listener has no text in front of them, so plain ordinals are the cheapest organization marks on the test. They also stop you from drifting back into a point you have already made.
Forty dollars a week for a dog walker. Nine hours a week per course. Nobody is fact-checking you, and a specific figure does two jobs at once: it proves the advice is real, and it gives your vocabulary something to be precise about.
"I know that feels risky, but it is usually the opposite." Naming what your listener is thinking and then answering it is the clearest audience-tuning signal available, and it costs one sentence.
A minute about dogs in general is a minute about nothing. Every sentence should be aimed at this cousin, in her apartment, on her Tuesday. The prompt gives you the specifics for free, and refusing them is the single commonest way to sound generic.
This is the one speaking task that happens in ordinary life every week. Next time someone asks you what to do, answer in 90 seconds with a position, three reasons and a close. The habit is the whole skill, and it costs no study time.
CELPIP Speaking Task 1 is Giving Advice. You are given somebody else's problem, usually a friend or a relative who has asked you what to do, and you talk them through it. You get 30 seconds to prepare and 90 seconds to speak. It is the first of the eight speaking tasks in the 2026 CELPIP format.
Thirty seconds of preparation and 90 seconds of recording. Along with Task 7 it is the longest speaking response on the test, and the extra 30 seconds change the answer: 90 seconds is room for three developed pieces of advice rather than a list of quick tips.
No. Raters do not assess whether your advice is wise or whether they agree with it. They assess the language: whether you take a position early, develop your reasons, use precise and varied vocabulary, sound natural, and match your tone to the person you are speaking to.
Two or three, properly developed. Ninety seconds is about 200 to 230 words at a natural pace, which is enough for three reasons with a concrete detail each. Eight quick tips score lower than three real ones, because Content and Coherence rewards the quality and development of ideas, not the count.
Yes, directly. Tone is one of the four things listed under Task Fulfillment. Task 1 names the relationship for you, a cousin, a co-worker, an aunt, and the register you owe each of them is different. Advising a cousin in the language of a business letter is a scored error, not a stylistic preference.
No. Task 1 is text only. A short written situation appears on the screen, you read it during the 30 second preparation, and it stays visible while you speak. The tasks with images are Task 3 and Task 4, which share one illustration, Task 5, which shows photographs of options, and Task 8.
That is a planning problem rather than a language problem, and it is the commonest way to lose marks here. Use the 30 seconds to pick three pieces of advice, not one, and attach something concrete to each: a number, a routine, a specific question to ask somebody. Repeating your first point to fill the time reads as thin content.
No. There is no timer and no evaluation anywhere in the practice course. You record yourself so that you can hear yourself, the recording stays in your browser and is never uploaded, and then you reveal a spoken model answer with its structure, key phrases and common mistakes.
Yes. All five questions, all five spoken model answers and every explanation on this page are free, with no account and no credit card required.
Yes. Everything here follows the 2026 CELPIP speaking format: eight tasks, a timer that runs per task and resets on every advance, and Task 1 running 30 seconds of preparation followed by 90 seconds of recorded speech.
Task 2 drops the 90 seconds to 60 and asks for one story instead of an argument. Or see every model answer on one page.
One story out of your own life in 60 seconds, and the reflection at the end is where the band is decided.
Learn Task 2 → 7The other 90 second task. Same length, no listener to persuade and nothing to lean on but your own argument.
Learn Task 7 →Every task, every question, every model answer, on one page with the topics listed in full.
See the samples →All 8 tasks back to back with the real prep and response clocks running.
See the speaking section →Five advice questions, no clock, no score. Record yourself, listen to what you actually sound like, then compare it with a model answer built the way the raters want.
