Speaking Task 1
The test opens by asking you to advise someone you know - a friend, a relative, a colleague - about an everyday decision. You get 30 seconds to prepare and 90 seconds to speak, and you speak to that person directly rather than about them.
Giving Advice is the first of the eight CELPIP Speaking tasks. The prompt describes someone facing an ordinary choice - changing jobs, choosing an apartment, learning to drive - and asks what you would tell them.
It is also the task that sets your voice for the whole section. The eight tasks run back to back in roughly 15 to 20 minutes, and once this one is recorded there is no returning to it, so the goal is a steady, organised answer rather than a perfect one.
The situations are deliberately ordinary and no specialist knowledge is ever needed. What varies is who you are talking to, because that decides how formal the advice is allowed to sound.
Use the first 10 seconds of the 30-second preparation to fix who you are speaking to and what they are actually deciding. Spend the remaining 20 choosing exactly two pieces of advice and one reason for each. Decide the skeleton, not the sentences - there is no time to script, and reading a script flattens your delivery.
Then pace the 90 seconds: about 10 seconds to open by naming the situation, 30 on the first piece of advice with its reason and a quick example, 30 on the second, and the last 20 on a short encouraging close. Two developed points fill the window comfortably; one leaves you stranded at the 45-second mark.
Ninety seconds feels generous until the clock is running. Rehearse with a timer until the shape - open, advise, advise, close - is automatic, because then 30 seconds of preparation is genuinely enough. Most marks lost on Task 1 are not vocabulary marks; they go to candidates who planned one good idea and discovered at the halfway point that they had nothing left to say.
Quick answers about Speaking Task 1.
Two, each with a reason and a quick example, fills 90 seconds comfortably. One piece of advice runs out of material well before the end; three forces you to rush and drop the explanations, which are the part worth saying.
Invent one. Pick whichever side gives you more vocabulary to work with and commit to it immediately. Hesitating over what you really think spends your 30 seconds of preparation on the wrong problem, and the preparation window is the one thing you cannot get back.
Use it to decide your two advice points and their reasons - nothing more. There is no time to script sentences, and an answer read from notes loses its intonation. Decide the skeleton, then improvise the words.
No. Every Speaking task is a single take: the microphone opens when preparation ends and closes when the time is up, with no replay and no second attempt. If a sentence goes wrong, correct it briefly and keep moving - a short self-correction sounds natural, while a long silence costs far more.
Match the relationship the prompt names. A close friend gets warm, direct language; a colleague or a neighbour you know less well gets something more measured. Choosing the register in your first sentence and holding it matters more than which register you chose.
Only Tasks 1 and 7 run for 90 seconds; the other six run for 60. Both are tasks where you develop your own ideas rather than react to a picture or a set of options, so the window is longer to give the reasoning room. Preparation stays at 30 seconds either way.