CELPIP Speaking Practice Test 1

Speaking Practice Test 1 is a free, full-length CELPIP speaking practice test built for the 2026 format. All 8 tasks are here, in the exam order, each with its own preparation window and its own speaking window. You speak into your microphone, the recording is transcribed, and a marker scores it against the four official criteria. It is rated Easy, which makes it the right place to begin if you have never sat a recorded speaking test before.

The thing candidates underestimate about CELPIP Speaking is that it is a monologue to a machine. There is no examiner nodding at you, no one to rescue a sentence you abandoned halfway, and no way to ask for the question again. Sixty seconds of silence is a scored answer. That is why the first attempt matters even at Easy: you are learning to talk to a countdown.

What is in this CELPIP speaking practice test?

Every subject below is written for this test and appears on no other test on the site. Reading them now is not cheating, it is preparation: what you will be scored on is how you build the answer, not whether the topic surprised you.

Task 1 puts your cousin in front of you. She has saved enough for her first laptop for school and wants to know what to think about before choosing. Task 2 asks for a time you helped a friend or a neighbour, whether that was moving furniture, fixing something in the house, or looking after a pet.

Tasks 3 and 4 share one picture, a busy farmers market on a sunny morning. A vendor in a green apron holds out a paper bag of carrots to an elderly man counting coins. A little girl in a red coat stretches toward a tray of strawberries while her mother holds her wrist. A baker leans out of a red truck to pass a wrapped loaf down to a woman in a yellow raincoat. At the flower stall a man holds a bunch of sunflowers in each hand while the florist holds up three fingers. Near the entrance, a young man kneels to tie a golden retriever to a post while the dog pulls hard toward a dropped muffin. Task 3 asks you to describe it to someone who cannot see it. Task 4 shows you the same picture and asks what will most probably happen next, which is why the dog and the muffin are there.

Task 5 is the three-screen one. Your family needs one bike the adults can share for errands: a used city bike at $220 with a rack and basket already fitted but 16 kilograms of steel and rust near the welds, or a new folding bike at $480 that folds in 20 seconds but needs $70 of extras and feels bumpy on gravel. You pick one, and then your family counters with a bike you never considered, a $2,600 electric cargo bike that swallows a week of groceries but is 2.4 metres long and will not fit in the shed. You persuade them anyway.

Task 6 hands you a problem with no clean answer: you collected the cake for your friend Maya's son's birthday and the wrong name is on it. A replacement will be ready after the party ends. You choose whether to speak to the bakery or to phone Maya. Task 7 asks whether young children should have their own mobile phone. Task 8 puts you in a furniture store in front of a floor lamp with three twisted brass rods that split into a copper bowl, a frosted glass egg and a small straw cone, all pointing different ways. Photographs are not allowed, so you call your sister Priya, describe it, and ask her whether to buy it.

The 8 tasks, timing and this test's subjects

Learn this grid before your first attempt. The timer is per task and resets when you advance, so a short answer on Task 2 buys you nothing on Task 7. Preparation cannot be skipped.

How your speaking is scored

Unlike Reading, Speaking has no answer key. Each of the 8 tasks is judged on four official criteria, and your level is a product of all eight together, not of your best one:

• Content and Coherence: how many ideas you give, how good they are, how you organize them, and whether you support them with examples.
• Vocabulary: word choice, suitability, range, precision and accuracy.
• Listenability: rhythm, pronunciation and intonation, how you handle pauses and self-correction, and your grammar and sentence variety.
• Task Fulfillment: relevance, completeness, tone and length. On Task 8, that includes actually asking Priya the question at the end.

Your recordings are transcribed and scored against those four, and the report gives you expert feedback on each plus an estimated CLB level on the 1 to 12 scale. Most permanent residence applicants are aiming at CLB 9 or above.

Why start here

Easy in CELPIP does not mean short, and it does not mean the criteria relax. The tasks run at full length and the clock is the same clock. What Easy buys you is familiar ground: a laptop, a market, a bike, a cake. Nobody needs to spend their 30 seconds of preparation working out what a laptop is for.

That matters because of what actually separates a CLB 5 from a CLB 12. Given the same picture, both candidates notice the same things. The gap is the descriptive machinery: precision, hedging, complex clauses, tuning your words to your listener. You cannot practise that while you are still panicking about the topic. Take this test once and ignore the score. The number is worth something on your second attempt.

Tips for this test

• Say your first sentence out loud during preparation. The most common way to lose Task 1 is to spend the first 15 of your 90 seconds finding a way to begin.
• On Task 3, give Priya's kind of listener a floor plan before you give them people: left, middle, right. Then the market becomes describable instead of a list.
• On Task 4, look for what is mid-motion. The dog straining toward the muffin and the girl reaching for the strawberries are unfinished actions, and unfinished actions are what a prediction is made of.
• On Task 5, argue against the cargo bike, not just for your own choice. Comparing is half the task name.
• On Task 8, describe the lamp by size, shape and comparison, and finish by asking your sister whether to buy it. Candidates describe beautifully and forget the ask, and the ask is scored.
• Keep talking. A weak sentence is scored. Silence is not.