IELTS Speaking Part 3: Foreign languages
10 Part 3 discussion questions on foreign languages, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
Are there many people who can speak foreign languages in your country?
Yes, more than you'd expect for a country of this size, and history accounts for most of it. Russian is still widely spoken here, since anybody educated before the nineties studied in it, and there are Russian-language schools running today, so it's entirely normal to hear two languages switching mid-conversation at home. Turkish comes almost free as well, because it's close enough to Azerbaijani that people pick it up from television without ever formally studying it. English is the newer story, and it's growing at real pace. It's compulsory at school, it's the working language of the oil companies and the technology sector, and among students it's become the obvious investment, which is why there are private centres on almost every corner in Baku. So two foreign languages is fairly ordinary among younger people; among their grandparents it was one, and a different one at that.
Does speaking other languages help at work?
It makes a very tangible difference, particularly in a country like ours. A large part of the economy runs on foreign companies, so English is often the difference between being considered for a job and being overlooked entirely, and the salary gap between a bilingual candidate and an equally qualified monolingual one is quite visible. A cousin of mine moved from a local firm into an international one purely because she could handle client calls in English. Beyond simply getting hired, language transforms the quality of the relationship itself. Negotiating through an interpreter is slow and everything arrives flattened, whereas being able to crack a joke or catch hesitation in somebody's voice is how trust actually gets built. People notice when you've made the effort in their language, even when you do it imperfectly. That human touch is very often what wins you the contract in the end.
Do people learn any languages other than English?
Yes, although the reasons differ quite sharply from the reasons for English. Russian remains widely studied here for practical, local purposes, since it's useful for business across the region, a lot of technical material exists only in it, and many families simply want to keep it alive in the household. Turkish is absorbed almost passively from television and music rather than studied formally at all. The other pattern is people choosing a language for one specific door they want to unlock. Students hoping for free university tuition learn German, which is why the German course centres in Baku are perpetually full, and a few are taking up Chinese because of the trade relationship and the scholarships attached to it. Those choices are strategic rather than romantic. Very few people now learn a language purely because they're drawn to the sound of it, which I find slightly sad.
What can people do to learn a foreign language?
The most useful thing is weaving the language into what you already do rather than treating it as extra work. Almost nobody sustains an hour of grammar every evening, but people will happily watch a series with subtitles, follow accounts in that language or switch their phone settings over, and that means daily contact instead of twice a week. I picked up most of my vocabulary from podcasts on the metro rather than from any textbook. What people avoid, though, is producing the language, and that's the part that genuinely propels you forward. You have to speak badly for a while, with a tandem partner, a tutor online, tourists, whoever happens to be available, because errors only get corrected once they're out in the open. Reading and listening supply the raw material; speaking is what turns it into something usable under pressure.
What's the best way to learn a language?
If I had to pick one thing, it's putting yourself somewhere the language is genuinely indispensable. Necessity achieves in three months what motivation manages in three years, because once ordering food or sorting out a phone contract depends on it, the language stops being a subject and becomes a tool. A friend of mine spent a semester in Poland with no Polish whatsoever and came back conversational, having never opened a grammar book. That said, immersion on its own tends to produce fluent speakers with permanent mistakes baked in. Without anybody correcting you, the errors you make in month one simply get repeated until they're almost impossible to shake off, which is why the strongest speakers combine real exposure with a teacher or a structured course. The environment delivers fluency and the structure keeps you accurate. Neither half works anywhere near as well in isolation.
Why do people learn foreign languages?
Most people's reasons are economic long before they're anything else. A second language opens up jobs, universities and the possibility of working abroad, and in a country where many of the leading employers are international, English in particular functions as a straightforward qualification. Plenty of my classmates were studying it not out of enjoyment but because a scholarship application demanded a certificate with a certain score. The other group learns for reasons that have nothing to do with money. People want to follow films without subtitles, to talk properly with relatives who emigrated, or to reclaim a heritage language their grandparents spoke, and I know several who took up Turkish or Korean entirely because of the dramas they were watching. That kind of learner often ends up surpassing the exam-driven one, because they keep going long after the certificate would have been collected.
Do you think learning a foreign language is important?
Very much so, though not quite for the reason people usually cite. The biggest gain is access, because an enormous amount of research, journalism and writing is never translated, or translated years too late, so a monolingual person is confined to whatever somebody else decided was worth converting. Anybody working in a technical field here knows the current material exists in English and essentially nowhere else, so the language becomes a condition of staying competent. The less obvious value is what it does to your thinking. Learning another language forces you to notice that your own way of expressing an idea is one option among several, and that makes you considerably more careful and far less certain your assumptions are universal. People who've learned a second language tend to be better listeners generally, and that isn't something a translation app can hand you.
Is it more important to learn foreign languages now than before?
More important, yes, and mainly because the world people work in has stopped being local. Study, remote employment and business now cross borders as a matter of routine, so somebody in Baku can be paid by a company in Berlin without ever relocating, and language is the only thing standing between them and that market. My grandparents could live an entire working life without ever needing another language, and that's genuinely no longer true for anybody remotely ambitious. The interesting counter-argument is that machine translation is eroding the practical need for it. Your phone will now handle a menu, an email or a signpost well enough, so the purely transactional reasons for learning are weakening year by year. What software still can't do is build a relationship or work out what somebody means rather than what they literally said, so the value has shifted from information to human connection.
Do you think that children adapt to new things more easily than adults?
Generally yes, and I think the main reason is psychological rather than biological. Children have no reputation to protect, so they'll attempt something, get it completely wrong and carry straight on, whereas an adult in the same situation is quietly calculating how foolish they're about to look. That's very obvious in language classes, where a seven-year-old repeats a strange sound cheerfully and a forty-year-old apologises before even attempting it. Everything is new to a child anyway, so adapting is simply their default state rather than a disruption to it. Where adults hold the edge is in strategy. My mother learned to use a smartphone slowly, but she learned it systematically, writing the steps down and asking why things worked, so now she genuinely understands what she's doing rather than just where to tap. So children absorb things faster and adults understand them more deeply, which strikes me as a fair trade.
How can people learn new things?
The most reliable way is doing the thing badly and often, rather than preparing at length to do it well. You can read about swimming or coding for a month and still be helpless in the water or in front of an editor, because knowledge only converts into skill through repetition and, crucially, through feedback telling you what went wrong. I learned more in my first fortnight of actually building something than in a whole semester of lectures about it. The other half of it is learning from people who are already accomplished at the thing. A mentor, a colleague or even an online community saves you the months you'd otherwise spend rediscovering mistakes that everybody in that field already made and solved years ago. Watching how an experienced person approaches a problem teaches you things they couldn't explain if you asked them directly. Practice builds the skill; other people stop you practising the wrong one.
Reading a model answer is not the same as saying one. The sample above shows what a strong Part 3 answer sounds like. What it cannot tell you is how yours sounds — whether you hesitate, repeat the question back, or run out of things to say at forty seconds.
You can record an answer to this exact question and get it marked on fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and pronunciation — the same four criteria the examiner uses.
Common questions
How is Part 3 different from Part 1?
Part 1 is about you; Part 3 is about people in general. The questions move to society, causes and consequences, and the answers are expected to be longer and more developed — an opinion plus a reason plus an example, rather than two sentences.
What if I have no opinion on the question?
You are not marked on the opinion, so pick one and support it. Saying you have never thought about it and stopping there leaves the examiner nothing to assess.
How long does Part 3 last?
Four to five minutes. The topics develop out of your Part 2 card, so the discussion is usually connected to what you just described.
Model answers written and reviewed by The English All-in-One IELTS team. They are teaching models showing what each band looks like, not real candidate scripts.