CELPIP Speaking Task 2: Talking about a Personal Experience
Can you tell a small, coherent story from your own life with a clear point?
A typical prompt
Talk about a time you learned something new that turned out to be useful. What was it, how did you learn it, and why did it matter to you?
The one thing that scores 9+
Tell an actual story with a beginning, a middle and an end, then finish with ONE clear takeaway. A specific detail ("everything came out burnt or bland") beats a general claim ("it was hard") every time, and it also fills the time naturally.
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.
A couple of years ago I decided to learn to cook properly, because I was ordering takeout almost every night and it was draining my budget. I started small — just a few simple meals from scratch, one new recipe a week. At first everything came out either burnt or completely bland, and I honestly nearly gave up. But I kept at it, and after about a month something clicked. Now I cook most nights, I've saved a ton of money, and it's actually become the part of the day where I relax. What it taught me is that you don't have to master everything at once — you pick one small thing and just get a little better each week.
What caps people at Level 7
- Listing facts instead of telling a story with a shape.
- No takeaway — the response just stops.
- Staying vague; without a concrete detail you run out of words early.
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.