IELTS Speaking Part 3: News, national identity
8 Part 3 discussion questions on news, national identity, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
Do you think it's important to have a national identity?
I think it is, mainly because a country needs some reason for strangers to cooperate with one another. People pay taxes, obey rules and pitch in during a crisis largely because they feel part of the same shared story, and where that feeling is absent, society tends to fragment along much narrower lines. You see it clearly after an earthquake or a flood, when people who've never met organise help within hours. It also matters as a way of preserving something distinctive in an increasingly homogenised world. If Azerbaijani children grow up with the language, the music and the food alongside everything global they consume, they end up gaining two things rather than losing one, and that's a genuine form of wealth. The caution I'd add is that identity works best when it's about belonging rather than about who doesn't belong. Pride in what you are is healthy; defining yourself against others isn't.
How can people develop their national identity?
Schools do most of the heavy lifting, and language sits right at the centre of it. Reading your own literature, learning the history behind the street names and hearing the anthem every week gives children a shared set of references, and that shared reference is essentially what identity boils down to. A child who grows up with the Dede Korkut stories has a link to the culture that no amount of general patriotism can replace. The stronger influence, though, is what happens outside the classroom. Identity is built by doing, cooking the dishes at Novruz, jumping over the bonfire, going to a match, hearing mugham at a family wedding, because taking part attaches feeling to it in a way lessons never manage. My generation learned far more about being Azerbaijani in our grandparents' kitchens than in any civics lesson. Travelling abroad achieves the same result from the opposite direction.
Why do local people like to read local news?
Because it's the only news that actually changes your day. If the water's being cut off in your district, if a school is closing or a bridge is under repair, that has immediate consequences for how you plan the week, whereas most national stories you simply absorb and forget by lunchtime. My mother checks a Telegram channel for our district precisely for that reason, not for anything a national broadcaster is covering. The second thing is recognition, which turns out to be a surprisingly strong pull. When the report concerns a street you walk down or a person you know by sight, you read it the way you'd listen to a neighbour talking rather than as information from strangers. That's also why small human stories travel so well locally, since a school team winning something means nothing nationally and a great deal to everybody involved.
Why do people like local news more than international news?
I'd say the main thing is a sense of agency. You can attend a meeting about a local road, complain to the district office or vote out a mayor, so the news connects to something you could actually act on, whereas a conflict on another continent leaves you informed and entirely powerless. That powerlessness grows tiring, and plenty of people quietly stop following international coverage for exactly that reason. The other issue is the effort involved in keeping up with it. Understanding a foreign political crisis properly requires background about parties, history and names you've never encountered, and without that the coverage is confusing rather than illuminating. Local news demands none of it, because you already know the geography and the personalities involved. I'd add that people don't reject international news outright, they follow the two or three stories that touch them directly and let the rest go.
How often do people in your country buy newspapers?
Very rarely now, and among people my age almost never at all. The news arrives on a phone long before it could possibly be printed, it costs nothing, and if a particular subject interests you it can be followed directly, so paying for yesterday's information feels genuinely strange to anyone under thirty. I honestly can't remember the last time I bought a paper, although I walk past the kiosks daily. Where print survives is with older readers, and it's about habit as much as information. My grandfather buys the same paper each morning on his walk, and it isn't really the news, it's the routine, the crossword and the fact that he finds reading on a screen tiring. You still see papers left out in barbershops and tea houses for the same reason. Circulation has clearly collapsed, but it won't vanish while that generation is still buying it.
Do you think visual media (film, photography) is important in how news is presented?
Hugely, and the first reason is simply evidence. A written report asks you to trust the reporter, whereas footage of a flood or a demonstration shows you the scale directly, which is why photographs from a war often shift public opinion when years of articles haven't managed to. The single image of a drowned child on a beach did more to change European attitudes towards refugees than any statistic ever could. The uncomfortable side is that pictures persuade you before you've had time to think it through. A dramatic thirty-second clip can make a small incident feel like a national crisis, and it strips out the context of who was standing outside the frame and what happened before filming started. Editors know this perfectly well, which is why the choice of image is often the most political decision in the entire report. So it's essential and manipulative in equal measure.
What do you think of news on social media?
I'm genuinely mixed on it. What it does brilliantly is speed and access, during the earthquake in Turkey people were posting from inside affected buildings while broadcasters were still confirming basic details, and ordinary witnesses can now publish things that would once have been quietly ignored. It has also broken the monopoly a handful of outlets used to hold over what counted as news. The problem is that the platforms aren't rewarding accuracy, they're rewarding attention. A furious, exaggerated post travels several times further than a careful correction, so misinformation gets a head start the truth never quite catches up on, and the feed keeps handing you more of whatever you already agreed with. I've watched relatives forward things in family chats that took me thirty seconds to disprove. So I use it to learn that something happened, and something slower to learn what actually happened.
How do people in your country get news?
Overwhelmingly through phones now, and that shift has happened remarkably fast. Most people I know take their news from Instagram or from Telegram channels that push headlines straight to the lock screen, so the news finds them during a commute or in a queue rather than being something they sit down for deliberately. My own reading is almost entirely notifications I follow up on later, if at all. The older generation presents a rather different picture, and television still holds them firmly. My parents watch the evening bulletin at the same time every day, and it gives their news a shape mine lacks, a beginning, an end, and somebody deciding what actually mattered. Word of mouth counts for a great deal too, especially in smaller towns where you'll hear something in the tea house before it appears anywhere in print. Between the two you get quite different pictures of the same country.
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.