IELTS Speaking Part 3: Language and globalisation
You are being assessed in English on questions about English, which makes the meta-awareness worth using rather than avoiding.
Whether you can discuss language as a system and a resource — and whether you can talk about your own learning without turning it into a complaint about the test.
Questions you can expect
Longer answers than Part 1 — thirty to forty-five seconds each. The examiner may disagree with you, which is the format working as intended.
- Why do so many people learn English?
- Will English remain the main international language?
- Is it a problem when small languages disappear?
- Should children learn a second language at primary school?
- Has globalisation made countries too similar?
- Is translation technology making language learning unnecessary?
- What is the best way to learn a language?
- Do people lose part of their identity when they speak another language?
How to build an answer here
- Separate the practical from the cultural. English as a tool and English as a threat to local languages are two different arguments.
- Speak from experience on the learning questions — you are the evidence, and here that is legitimate rather than a lapse into Part 2.
- Hedge the prediction questions hard. Nobody knows what happens to a world language and confident forecasting sounds naive.
- On disappearing languages, name what is lost specifically rather than saying 'culture'.
Language this theme needs
Part 3 is scored on whether you can generalise and speculate without overstating. These are the phrases that do that work in this particular area.
a lingua franca
the exact term, and it lands well here
die out
for languages with no remaining speakers
at the expense of
for one language displacing another
immerse yourself in
the standard collocation for learning method
pick up
for acquiring language informally
there's no substitute for
for what technology cannot replace
The trap in this theme
Turning 'what is the best way to learn a language?' into a complaint about how hard IELTS is.
The examiner is not the exam board and cannot help. Answer it as a genuine question about method — what worked for you, and what you would tell someone starting.
Two of these, answered at band 8
Watch the moves, not the opinions — take a position, hedge it as far as you actually believe it, support it, and give the strongest objection its due. Your views can be the opposite of these and score the same. A memorised Part 3 answer is more obvious than a memorised Part 1 one, because the examiner follows up on what you just said and a script cannot survive the follow-up.
Is it a problem that English has become the global language?
It's a large advantage for some people and a hidden tax on everyone else, and the second half is what tends to go unexamined. A native speaker gets access to the world's research, business and internet at no cost. Everyone else pays years of their life for the same access, and then still operates at a disadvantage in every meeting. I don't think there's a realistic alternative — a common language is genuinely useful — but I'd want people who have it for free to be clearer that it was free.
Why it worksReframes an apparently neutral fact as a distributional question, and then declines the easy conclusion, which keeps it from sounding like a rehearsed grievance.
Should minority languages be preserved?
Yes, and I think the usual arguments for it are weaker than the real one. People tend to say each language contains a unique worldview, which is a nice idea and quite hard to demonstrate. The stronger argument is simpler: language is how communities hold their own history, and a community that loses it becomes dependent on someone else's account of who they are. That's a loss you can point at, and it doesn't require anything romantic about grammar.
Why it worksRejects the standard argument for its own position before making a better one, which shows genuine independent reasoning rather than recall.
Other Part 3 themes
Art & creativity
The least prepared theme in Part 3, which makes it the easiest place to say something genuinely your own.
Education
The most frequent Part 3 area, and the one where personal school memories most often crowd out the actual question.
Work & careers
Full of questions about change over time, which makes tense control as important as content here.
Technology & society
Invites strong opinions and punishes them — the balanced answer consistently outscores the alarmed one.
Environment
The theme most damaged by preparation — memorised statistics are obvious and score badly.
Family & relationships
The theme where candidates most reliably slip back into Part 2 and start telling stories about their own family.
Practise being disagreed with
Oliver pushes back in Part 3 the way a real examiner does — not to catch you out, but because holding a position under mild pressure is exactly what is being scored. That is not something you can rehearse against a list of questions. The first test is free.
This guide is written from the published IELTS Speaking band descriptors, in our own words. For the official wording, see the British Council's band descriptors. MockLive AI is an independent practice tool and is not affiliated with IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge University Press & Assessment.