Twelve role-plays. A partner’s brief. A sheet to mark yourself.
The OET role-play cannot be practised silently. It needs a card, three minutes, a partner who brings a worry, and then an honest look at the recording against the nine criteria. This deck gives you all four: the candidate’s card as it would look in the test, the patient’s brief for whoever plays them, the moves a Grade B run makes, and a marking sheet built on the assessors’ own criteria. And when you have recorded a run, a transcript of it can be read against the criteria at the foot of the page.
Four parts, and the worry is on the other card.
Every candidate card has a setting, your role and the patient in a paragraph, and four or five task bullets. The interlocutor holds the patient’s card: what they feel, what they will say, and how they will behave. The bullets tell you what to do. The patient’s card tells you why it will be hard, and you only find that out by asking. That is why every card below comes in two halves.
Sort the bullets first
Each bullet is a find-out, a get-across or an agree. The find-outs come first in the room, whatever order the card lists them in.
Open with a question
Greeting, name, purpose, then an open question. The first thirty seconds set up three of the five clinical criteria.
Reading the bullets aloud
The card is a plan, not a script. A role-play that walks the bullets in order without listening scores the language and loses the clinical criteria.
Two questions in one breath
“Is it worse at night and have you taken anything?” is a compound question, and the assessors listen for it.
Twelve original cards. Run one, then open the second half.
Filter by profession or deal one at random. Each card opens to the partner’s brief, the moves a Grade B run makes on every criterion, and a marking sheet. Listening and Reading are the same for all twelve professions; the role-plays are not, so practise in your own.
What the nine boxes are measuring.
The four linguistic criteria are scored 0 to 6 and the five clinical communication criteria 0 to 3, the same scales the assessors use. The sheet turns your marks into a shape, not a score: a run with every clinical criterion at 2 or more and every linguistic criterion at 4 or more is the shape of a Grade B run. That threshold is my reading of the published descriptors, not an official conversion; the assessors weight and scale the nine into 0 to 500 and do not publish the arithmetic. Mark the recording, not the memory of it, and mark what a stranger would hear.
Intelligibility · Fluency · Appropriateness · Grammar and expression
IELTS Speaking under other names, with one addition: appropriateness of register to this patient. A 4 means easy to follow, normal pace, plain English to the patient, errors that do not intrude.
Relationship · Perspective · Structure · Gathering · Giving
The five things a good clinician does in any consultation, heard in English. A 2 means most of the sub-skills, most of the time. The Speaking page lists every sub-skill under each.
Paste what you said, and have the five clinical criteria read.
Record a run of any card, transcribe your side (your phone’s dictation or any transcription app will do; include the partner’s lines if you can), and paste it below with the card. The read scores the five clinical communication criteria and the two linguistic criteria a transcript can show; it cannot hear your pronunciation and says so. It is the same first read the writing checker gives a letter, and nothing you paste is stored.
Change this first
One line, said better
A first read of a transcript against the published criteria. It marks the words, not the voice: pronunciation and most of fluency are outside it, and the shape it gives is a rough position, not a score. The full marked recording, with the phrase that would have earned each point, is what a lesson is for.
A partner tells you it felt fine. A tutor tells you where the marks went.
In an OET Speaking lesson I am the patient: I bring the worry and the difficulty the real interlocutor would, we run the card live against the clock, and then we mark the recording together, criterion by criterion, with the phrase that would have earned the point named each time. Two role-plays fit in a lesson.
Book a lesson with AdamThe criteria, the sub-skills, the phrase bank and a worked opening are on the OET Speaking page; the letter is on the Writing page; the whole test is on the OET hub.