Inside the IELTS Speaking Simulator We Built for Language Teachers

Speaking is the part of IELTS preparation that most teachers I talk to find hardest to deliver well with a big class.

One-to-one mock speaking tests are great, but they're time-consuming. Once you've got 20 students all needing speaking practice before test day, something has to give. 

Usually it's frequency. Students get one or two proper mocks, maybe three if they're lucky, and the rest of their preparation happens in pairs or small groups, which is useful but not the same as sitting opposite an examiner.

We've been working on a way to fill that gap. This article is a walk-through of what we built and the design decisions behind it. If you teach IELTS and you've ever wished your students could do realistic speaking practice without you having to be in the room, this is for you.

What the IELTS Simulator does

Students take IELTS speaking mock tests on their own, at any time, with an instant band score and feedback on the IELTS marking criteria. They get unlimited attempts, and teachers see the results in their dashboard alongside writing scores and progress over time.

It gives your students a way to do realistic speaking practice without you needing to be in the room, and gives you reliable data on where each student actually is.

Why "realistic" matters

There are plenty of AI tools out there that will let a student have a conversation in English. That's useful for general fluency, but it's not the same as preparing for IELTS speaking.

The IELTS exam has a very specific shape, and students who haven't sat in that shape before tend to struggle with timing, with the cue card format in Part 2, and with the abstract discussion in Part 3. The whole point of practice is to build the muscle memory for that shape, so test day feels familiar instead of foreign.

That's why we've made a series of deliberate design choices to mirror the real exam. 

• Audio-only questions in Parts 1 and 3. Students hear the examiner ask the question, the same way it happens in the real test. There's no text on screen to read - so students practice the exact skills they will need. 

• Practicing good answer length. Knowing how long two minutes feels is a skill, and it's one of the things that catches students out most in Part 2. As they speak, we show an audio bar that stays red when they haven't spoken for long enough, and turns green when they've hit the sweet spot. Same for Parts 1 and 3, where the expected answer length is shorter. Over a few attempts, students stop needing the bar. They start to feel how long an answer should be. That's the muscle memory you want them to walk into the real exam with.

• One attempt per question, no editing. Once a student has spoken, that's the answer. No retakes mid-test, no re-recording a sentence they didn't like. The same way it works on test day.

• Big range of questions. We've also built up a wide range of realistic question topics, each one quality-checked by IELTS examiners. Students can practise a random topic when they want general exposure, or pick a specific topic when they want to focus. Teachers can also send a student a specific topic directly.

The scoring

Each response is analysed against the official IELTS speaking criteria: fluency and coherence, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy. Students get an overall band score plus a breakdown for each of the three criteria.

A few things to flag here. We've benchmarked our scoring against certified IELTS examiners:

• 100% of scores fall within ±1 band of the examiner score

• 92% of scores fall within ±0.5 band

What students actually see on the feedback page

Once the students have finished their mock test, our AI marks their answer for 15-20 seconds, and then the feedback page appears. Here's what's on it.

• Overall band score plus a breakdown across the three criteria. So the student sees not just where they landed, but which descriptor pulled them down.

• A sentence-by-sentence analysis of what they said. Every sentence is transcribed, and the transcript is very accurate — it catches the ums, the uhs, the false starts, the pauses, all the small things that disappear from a student's memory the moment they stop speaking. Errors are highlighted directly on the sentence.

• The corrected version of each sentence. Right next to what they said, the student sees what they should have said. The actual sentence they tried to produce, rebuilt properly.

• An AI voice reading the corrected version out loud. The student can hear how the sentence is supposed to sound. So they finish a question knowing three things: what they said, what they should have said, and how they should have said it.

IELTS Teachers get full visibility

• As IELTS Teachers, you'll get to see and hear everything your students are doing. You'll see their scores, feedback, and be able to hear exactly what they said.

• Get class data and insights - Every student error is tagged. We then share insights on where they are making errors, so you can plan your lessons around where they need to improve.

Why not just use ChatGPT?

This is a fair question, and one I get asked a lot.

ChatGPT is a brilliant general-purpose tool, and students absolutely should use it for things like vocabulary checks, grammar questions, and casual conversation practice.

What it isn't built for is IELTS assessment. It doesn't follow the official band descriptors, it gives different scores to the same answer on different days, and many students complain that it asks the same questions over and over again.

For a school trying to track student readiness across a cohort, that inconsistency makes ChatGPT scores effectively unusable. You can't compare two students, you can't track one student over time, and you can't trust the feedback.

Keenu is built specifically for IELTS, with scoring designed to be defensible and repeatable.

Let your students take unlimited mock IELTS tests

The easiest way to see how this works is to try it yourself. You can take a mock test as a student would, see the scoring in action, and have a look at what the teacher dashboard shows. There's a 14-day free trial for schools, no card needed.

If you'd rather have a quick call first, drop me a line at francis@keenu.io and we'll set something up.

Start 14-day Free Trial