CELPIP Speaking Task 2 Template (Personal Experience)

You get 30 seconds to prepare and 60 seconds to speak. The clock runs on its own, there is no pause button, and the recording stops mid-word if you are still going at 60 seconds.

Prometric's Speaking Test Overview table in the CELPIP Speaking Pro study packs lists preparation and speaking time for every task. Task 2 is a one-minute task:

Only Tasks 1 and 7 get 90 seconds. Task 2 does not. This matters more here than on any other task, because a story has a natural shape and most people pace it for 90 seconds without noticing. If your practice answers have been running to a minute and a half, the version the rater hears will stop somewhere in the middle of your main event and never reach the reflection.

Sixty seconds is roughly 130 to 150 spoken words at a comfortable pace. Three short stages, not five.

Prometric describes Task 2 as "Tell a story about a past experience." That is the entire instruction, and it comes from the CELPIP Speaking Pro study packs.

Read it again, because the wording is doing something specific. It says story, not description and not opinion. A story has a before, a middle and an after. A list of facts about a place you once visited is not a story, and it is the single most common way this task goes wrong.

The task is also called Talking about a Personal Experience, which is why you will see both names in prep material.

Prometric does not publish the exact on-screen prompt wording for Task 2 anywhere in its current test-taker materials, so be careful with any template that claims to quote your screen word for word. What you can rely on is the shape: a topic, 30 seconds, then the microphone.

What CELPIP actually rates on Task 2

CELPIP Speaking is rated on four dimensions: Content/Coherence, Vocabulary, Listenability and Task Fulfillment. Those four names are Prometric's own, published as the Speaking Performance Standards, and they apply to all eight scored tasks.

Three things about this list, because most CELPIP prep gets them wrong:

Each response is scored separately on all four dimensions, and one bad minute does not decide your level. The CELPIP Speaking Pro study packs say it plainly: "As each Speaking response is scored separately in each of the four dimensions, and your Level is a product of your scores on all 8 tasks, there are many ways to achieve a particular CELPIP Level." No points formula is published, and no per-dimension weighting is published either. If Task 2 goes badly, seven tasks are still ahead of you.

There is no Grammar band. Look at the middle column above. Grammar is not one of the four dimensions, it is one item inside Listenability, sitting between self-correction and sentence variety. That does not make grammar irrelevant, and the tense work in this template is worth doing, because tenses that slip make you harder to follow. But nobody is scoring your past perfect on its own line, and any page or AI summary telling you the test "grades your grammar" is describing a band that does not exist.

"Coherence and Cohesion", "Lexical Resource" and "Grammatical Range and Accuracy" are IELTS terms. If a Task 2 template promises to lift your Lexical Resource, it was written for a different test.

For how the four dimensions turn into a level, see the CELPIP Speaking score chart.

What strong Task 2 answers do well

These are not the official rating criteria. They are the three habits that tend to earn what the criteria reward on a story task.

Pick the story first and everything else second. CELPIP's own advice for Task 2 is short, and in our words it comes down to five points you can memorise:

Thirty seconds is not enough to write sentences, and trying to is what causes the frozen first five seconds. Jot three things instead: when and where, the one thing that happened, and how you felt about it afterwards. Three words is fine. The template below turns those three notes into a full minute.

The trap on this task is spending twenty of your thirty seconds choosing between two stories. Take the first usable one. A slightly duller story told properly beats a better story you only half-planned.

No, and Prometric says so directly. The Task 2 strategy list in the CELPIP Speaking Pro study packs includes the line "If you can't think of a real experience from your life, make one up."

That is official guidance from the organisation that writes the test, not a loophole somebody found. It exists because the task measures how well you tell a story in English, and freezing for fifteen seconds while you hunt for a genuine memory costs you a quarter of your answer.

One thing to be careful about, because this is where a lot of advice goes wrong: the reason invention is allowed is not that "the test only grades your grammar." There is no Grammar band on CELPIP Speaking, and grammar sits inside Listenability. Invention is allowed because a made-up experience can still be coherent, precisely worded, easy to listen to and on task, which is the whole of what gets scored.

Practical version: keep two or three flexible stories ready, ones that can be bent to fit a topic. A time something went wrong and you fixed it. A time somebody helped you. A first day at something. Most Task 2 prompts can be answered with one of those three if you change the details on the fly.

Do not invent something you cannot describe. If you have never been skiing, a skiing story will run out of specifics at second twenty and the vocabulary will thin out exactly where the rater is listening for it.

Try this on a real Task 2 question, free

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Answer a free Speaking Task 2 question

Each one runs the same three stages and lands inside the 60-second window. Read them aloud with a timer before you decide they sound easy.

A template you have never spoken out loud is not a template, it is a paragraph you have read. The gap between the two shows up at about second forty on test day, which is where most unpractised answers run out of story and start repeating.

Record against a real 60-second clock at least ten times before you book. Our Task 2 question bank holds 91 personal-experience prompts, from getting lost somewhere to a first day at a new job, and scores what you record so you find out whether the reflection actually landed or you just ran out of time.

Two more things worth doing while you are here. Read the Task 1 template for Giving Advice, because Task 1 and Task 2 sit back to back and Task 1 is one of only two tasks that gives you 90 seconds, so the pacing is different. Then look at how the CELPIP Speaking test is organised so that nothing on test day is a surprise.

If you want more sample responses at different levels, we keep a separate set of Speaking Task 2 tips and sample responses, and the Task 2 vocabulary list covers the emotion and sequencing words this task keeps asking for. The full set of eight speaking templates is there when you are ready to work through the rest.