AI experiments: IGCSE ESL speaking assessment bank

By Pete on February 8, 2026 • ( 0 )

Yep, I’m still AI-novicing over here. Today I was looking for a quick fix for the upcoming IGCSE ESL speaking exams (window opens end of March). I wanted a curated bank of tests, or at least test-like questions for all three parts. I got Gemini on the case, telling it (him/her/them?) to curate a list of the speaking tests from 2025 across all series.

It reviewed all the official teacher/examiner notes that it could find, then asked me to help identify the exact bits I wanted curated. We went back and forth for a bit, and I ended up with a Gemini-created Google sheet looking like this:

With a collated list of 70 speaking assessments.

So, how accurate is it? Well, it looks like Gemini has had some artistic license. It didn’t actually curate the exact exam content. I clocked this straight away just by looking at Part 1 questions:

So it reduced the number of questions and/or went off-piste a bit. HOWEVER, are they Part-1-enough for practice purposes? Yeah…

Part 2 and 3 output was better, and I think some are actually true to the content:

So, I want this to be a working doc for students. By my reckoning, we’ve got 48 days until our speaking exam. So, one practice a day, then some dedicated lesson time for more with focused teacher feedback.

Our learners get loads of additional English support – interventions, one-to-one sessions, check-ins in their boarding house, etc. This speaking bank gives a ready-made practice record which can be used during any of those sessions.

I’ve added ‘My Notes’ columns. The guidance would be for learners to spend some time planning their answers (it’s practice!).
Teachers/support staff can act as examiners. They can then review the notes with the learner to see if they included that content in their answer, or to discuss how they could extend their ideas.
I’ve added these sections after each test:

Teachers (or peers if they are working together in their boarding house) can give general feedback on areas of strength/development (grammar range, vocab range, etc, see drop down). After a while, learners may notice a pattern in their areas for development.
Space for more detailed comments, space for suggested new vocab (probs should just say ‘new language’; there) from the examiner.
‘Status’ just has a dropdown for ‘practiced, redo the practice to improve, not practiced’. I planned to add conditional formatting their to change cell colours when practice test completed but it sounded faffy and I was short on time.

So, a mass (somewhat fake) curation from AI, guided by novice-AI-user me. Link below if you think it would be useful. Feel free to tweak etc and if you make it better (or already have something better) then please share!

IGCSE ESL Speaking assessment practice bank

Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash