CELPIP Speaking Task 3: Describing a Scene
Can you describe a picture clearly and in order, using the present continuous?
A typical prompt
Imagine a busy farmers’ market on a Saturday morning: stalls of fruit and vegetables, a musician playing, families walking through. Describe what you see, hear, and what people are doing.
The one thing that scores 9+
Use the PRESENT CONTINUOUS throughout ("is holding", "are walking") and move through the picture systematically — foreground to background, or left to right — so you cover the whole scene instead of fixating on one corner.
A Band-9 sample answer
Original — written to show the technique, not to memorise. Raters penalise memorised, off-topic answers, so use it as a model for structure, then say your own.
In the foreground, a woman is standing at a fruit stall, holding up an apple and checking it before she buys. Behind the table, the vendor is weighing a bag of tomatoes for another customer. Just to the left, a young family is walking slowly through the market — the father is pushing a stroller and the two children are pointing at a stand full of flowers. In the background, a musician is playing a guitar and a small crowd is gathering around him. Over on the right, steam is rising from a food truck where someone is cooking. Overall it's a bright, busy Saturday morning, and everyone seems relaxed and cheerful.
What caps people at Level 7
- Slipping into past or future tense instead of the present continuous.
- Describing one object in huge detail and ignoring the rest of the picture.
- No sense of place — jumping around instead of moving through the scene.
Practise this task
Reading a sample only gets you so far — you improve by speaking under the clock. Take the prep time, record your own answer on your phone, and compare it to the sample above and the level descriptors in our CELPIP score decoder. All 8 speaking tasks run in thefree CELPIP full mock, and the whole format is in theCELPIP format guide.