IELTS Speaking Part 3: Opinions and ideas
8 Part 3 discussion questions on opinions and ideas, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
When do children begin to have their own ideas and opinions?
Preferences surface astonishingly early, well before children can articulate them. Any parent of a two-year-old knows that the word no arrives with real conviction, insisting on this jumper and not that one, this story again rather than a new one, and while that isn't reasoning as such, it's unmistakably a point of view being defended. By four or five they'll declare a rule unfair, which marks the beginning of an argument rather than a mere preference. Genuinely independent opinions, the kind built from evidence and able to withstand disagreement, emerge much later, usually around twelve or thirteen. That's when children start noticing adults contradicting each other, and once they realise authority isn't unanimous, they begin choosing between positions rather than simply absorbing one. Adolescence gets a bad reputation for this, but arguing with your parents is largely how a person tests whether their own reasoning actually holds up.
Who do children listen to more, their parents or their teachers?
It shifts with age, and quite sharply too. A six or seven-year-old will usually take the teacher's word over anything said at home, because the teacher represents the outside world and its rules, and most parents have experienced being corrected at dinner because that isn't how our teacher does it. At that stage school carries an authority that family familiarity has worn thin. As children grow older the balance tips, and by the teenage years teachers shape a fairly narrow academic band while parents mould almost everything beneath it. Attitudes to money, work, honesty and how you treat people stem from years of watching adults at close range, and they tend to resurface later even in children who argued furiously against them. So teachers win the short-term skirmishes and parents win the long-term war. Which matters more probably hinges on whether you're asking about homework or about how somebody eventually turns out.
Who are smart children likely to be influenced by?
Clever children tend to gravitate towards whoever can genuinely challenge them, and quite often that isn't somebody their own age. It might be an older sibling, an uncle who argues with them properly, or one particular teacher who refuses to accept a lazy answer, and that single relationship can shape an entire career, since most people who ended up in science can name the teacher who set them on that path. What earns the influence is being taken seriously, not merely being an adult. The other powerful influence is what they read, a channel other children draw on far less. A bright twelve-year-old working through books, documentaries and online lectures is effectively being mentored by people she'll never meet, and her opinions start stemming from that material rather than from her classmates. It's also why smart children can seem oddly out of step with their own age group.
Do you think children will always have ideas and opinions similar to those of their parents?
On fundamental values the overlap is usually substantial and remarkably persistent. A child spends roughly two decades absorbing how a family handles money, honesty, religion and obligation, and that becomes the default setting carried into adulthood, even when they'd insist they think entirely for themselves. You often see people rediscovering their parents' opinions in their thirties after rejecting them outright at twenty. Where children reliably diverge is on anything shaped by their own era. Attitudes to gender roles, career choice, marriage and technology stem from the world a person actually grows up in, and since that world shifts every generation, a young Azerbaijani today will view many of these questions quite differently from a parent raised in the nineteen-eighties. So the usual pattern is inherited foundations with a very different surface layered on top. Complete agreement would actually be a bad sign, since it would mean nobody had genuinely thought anything through for themselves.
Are children's opinions influenced by their parents?
Enormously, though the mechanism is far less deliberate than parents tend to imagine. Children pay much closer attention to what adults do and say casually than to anything delivered as a formal lesson, so an offhand remark about a neighbour, or the way a father speaks to a waiter, teaches more than a hundred lectures about respect ever could. Values are caught rather than taught, which is exactly why lecturing a child so rarely works. The second route is control over what the child is exposed to in the first place. Parents choose the school, the neighbourhood, the languages spoken at home, which relatives visit and what's permitted on television, and that curated environment quietly sets the range of opinions a child can even encounter. By the time they're old enough to think independently, much of the raw material has already been selected for them. Most of that influence has taken hold long before anyone sits down for a serious conversation.
What do young people have strong opinions about?
Fairness is the theme that reliably generates heat, in my experience. Young people react fiercely to anything resembling an unearned advantage or an injustice, whether that's climate policy, corruption, the treatment of women, or simply a teacher who punishes one student while overlooking another, partly because they haven't yet acquired the adult habit of assuming nothing can change. That moral directness is easy to mock and genuinely valuable. The other area is personal freedom, especially the right to define themselves. Music, clothes, who they spend time with and above all what they'll study or pursue as a career are all fiercely defended, because these are the first real decisions a person makes about their own identity. Arguments about choosing law instead of design are rarely about the subject at all; they're about who gets to decide. Both themes stem from the same place, a strong sense that they deserve to be taken seriously.
How can teachers help children develop their ideas and opinions?
By far the best thing a teacher can do is ask questions with no single approved answer. If a literature class is asked whether a character was right to lie, or a geography lesson asks whether a new road should cut through a village, students have to construct a position instead of retrieving one, and that's exactly the muscle we're trying to build. Structured debate, where pupils are sometimes made to argue the side they disagree with, does this even more effectively. The second requirement is making disagreement genuinely safe, including disagreement with the teacher herself. A class where an unusual answer gets ridiculed will fall silent within a month, whereas a teacher who responds by asking to see the evidence teaches children that opinions are things you justify rather than things you're simply handed. What both approaches share is that the teacher stops being the source of the answer. Children asked to reason in class tend to carry on doing it everywhere else as well.
When do people change opinions?
Almost always when something happens to them personally, rather than when they encounter a better argument. Somebody can dismiss statistics about the health service for years and then change completely after a week sitting in a hospital with a relative, because direct experience overrides abstraction in a way no debate ever manages. That's a large part of why campaigns built purely on facts so often fall flat. The other thing that shifts people is watching somebody they trust hold the opposite view. Opinions function partly as social badges, so admitting you were wrong can feel like leaving a group, but if a respected friend or family member has already moved, the change stops feeling like a betrayal. People rarely change their minds under attack, and quite often shift quietly a few weeks after a conversation that seemed to go nowhere at the time. It's a slow process, and it almost never happens in the heat of an argument.
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.