What is OET Speaking?

A complete guide to the OET Speaking sub-test — format, timing, and how it's scored.

By SpeakOET Team · July 4, 2026

The format

OET Speaking is a face-to-face (or video-call) test with a trained interlocutor, taken separately from Listening, Reading, and Writing. It's built around your profession — nurses get nursing scenarios, doctors get medical scenarios — and it's recorded for assessment.

You complete two roleplays, each about 5 minutes long. Before each one, you get roughly 2 minutes to read a card describing the scenario: who you are, who the patient is, and what you need to cover. The interlocutor plays the patient or a relative and improvises around the scenario — it isn't scripted, so you have to actually listen and respond.

What's being assessed

Two examiners score your recording against two groups of criteria:

• Linguistic criteria — intelligibility, fluency, appropriateness of language, and resources of grammar and expression. This is the "is your English clear and natural" half.
• Clinical communication criteria — relationship building, understanding and incorporating the patient's perspective, providing structure, information gathering, and information giving. This is the "are you communicating like a safe, patient-centred clinician" half.

That second group is what trips up a lot of strong English speakers — it's not enough to speak fluently, you also need to structure the conversation, check the patient understands, and respond to what they actually say rather than delivering a memorised script.

Why it feels different from other exams

Most English tests ask you to describe a photo or give an opinion on a general topic. OET Speaking asks you to actually do your job in English — explain a procedure, handle an anxious relative, break bad news calmly. That's why generic speaking practice (or a friend reading questions off a list) only gets you so far: the skill you're being tested on is reacting in character, in real time.

Always check the exact current format and marking guide on the official OET website — details like timing and criteria weighting are set by OET, not by us.