How can you practise for the O-Level English oral at home?

What should home practice for the English oral cover?

Both parts of Paper 4, in the order they come. The paper is worth 30 marks and 20% of the subject, takes about 20 minutes, including 10 minutes of preparation, and splits evenly between a prepared talk and a discussion.

Our guidance: give the discussion as much practice time as the prepared talk, since the two parts carry the same marks. The routine below splits them evenly.

What do you need to practise at home?

• A phone that records audio, and a timer. That is the whole of the equipment.
• Short clips of everyday scenes. SEAB publishes no past clips or prompts, so there is no official practice material. A minute or two of any video showing people doing something (a community event, a sport, a workplace) works as a stand-in.
• Prompts in the shape the exam uses. The recalled prompts on the recalled O-Level English oral topics show the wording candidates report, such as "Do you think the activity shown in the video is meaningful? Why or why not?" Use them as models, not as a list to expect.
• A sheet of paper for notes. In the 2026 O-Level paper candidates were given one and could refer to it during the Planned Response.
• The band descriptors. They are transcribed on how Response, Delivery and Spoken Interaction are marked, and the self-check below is built from them.

What does a weekly routine look like?

Here is the routine we suggest. The number of sessions is our suggestion, not something there is evidence for; what matters is that each week includes a full run, a review and a redo.

1. Session one, the full run. Watch a clip, read a prompt, and prepare against the clock, keeping to the preparation time the real paper allows (it takes about 20 minutes, including 10 minutes of preparation). Give the response, recorded. Then have a parent, sibling or friend ask two or three discussion questions on the wider topic, and answer them, still recording.
2. Session two, the review. Play the recording back and write out the Planned Response word for word. Go through the self-check below with the transcript in front of you. Pick the one thing that would most improve the answer.
3. Session three, the redo and a cold discussion. Give the same response again, changing only that one thing, and compare the two recordings. Then answer a few discussion questions on a topic you have not prepared, because nothing in SEAB's instructions gives you the real discussion questions in advance.

Between sessions, the cheapest practice there is: one discussion question at dinner or in the car, answered properly, with a reason and an example. The syllabus says the discussion is on a topic "broadly related" to the clip, so in our view everyday questions about school, community and technology are fair rehearsal.

How do you check a recording against the descriptors?

Turn each descriptor phrase into a question you can answer from the transcript. The phrases below are SEAB's, from the top bands; the questions are ours.

Two checks that are not descriptor phrases but follow from the task: did the response use the time the syllabus allows for it, and did it end by answering the question? Our worked answers show how far apart a top-band and a middle-band response can be on length; our middle-band answers are about 110 to 120 words and our top-band ones about 290. Those are counts of our own answers, not a target SEAB sets. Both are on the Planned Response page.

What can a home recording not tell you?

It cannot give you a mark, and it cannot judge Delivery. The Planned Response's Delivery criterion names pronunciation, fluency and intonation, and those are heard by a trained listener, not read from a transcript. We do not offer a written self-check for pronunciation or intonation, because any advice on how something should sound is a claim we cannot source. A teacher who can listen to the student is the right person for that part.

What a recording does well is the content side: whether the ideas are developed and organised, whether examples are explained, whether the discussion goes anywhere. It also shows you things that are easy to miss while speaking, like finishing well before the time is up, or saying the same thing in your conclusion as in your first sentence. Nothing in this routine needs a tool, ours or anyone's.

How can a parent help without teaching English?

• Be the examiner for the discussion. Ask a question on the wider topic, then a follow-up. You do not need to know the answer to ask "why?"
• Ask "and then what?" When a point is raised and dropped, that one question asks for the second sentence the descriptors reward.
• Listen for shape, not vocabulary. Could you describe the answer afterwards ("the obvious point, then the more important one, then a disagreement")? If not, it may be a list.
• Time it. Note when the response stopped, compared with the time allowed.
• Leave sound to the teacher. Correcting pronunciation by ear at home is outside what this routine asks of you.

If the discussion stalls, recovering when you blank or mishear has ways back in, and fillers and hedges explains how to count fillers without trying to suppress them.