OET Speaking Warm-Up Questions: What to Expect

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The OET Speaking warm-up is a short, unscored conversation with your interlocutor at the very start of the sub-test, before either role play begins. OET's own test-day guidance says the interlocutor "will guide you through the test, starting with a warm-up to help you feel comfortable" and that "this part is not assessed" — and that the interlocutor does not assess your performance at any point. It is small talk about your job: how long you have worked, where, what you enjoy, what you find hard. Nothing you say in it appears on your score report. And yet it is the single most under-used minute in the whole test, because it is the only speech you produce all day that costs you nothing — and the graded role play starts a few minutes later, whether your voice has woken up or not.

In this guide: warm-up at a glance · what it is for and who is listening · warm-up questions for nurses · warm-up questions for doctors · how long it lasts · why freezing here follows you · how to answer · practising it alone · how we researched this · when the warm-up is not your problem · FAQ

The OET Speaking warm-up at a glance

If you want the surrounding structure rather than the warm-up specifically, our full breakdowns are OET Speaking for nurses and OET Speaking for doctors.

What the warm-up is for and who is listening

Three official facts settle most of the anxiety around this section.

First, it is explicitly unassessed. OET's guidance for candidates taking the sub-test on computer says the interlocutor "will guide you through the test, starting with a warm-up to help you feel comfortable. This part is not assessed." The at-home Zoom user guide puts it even more casually: the interlocutor will "begin the test by asking a few questions to help you relax, but don't worry, this part of your conversation is not assessed."

Second, the person in front of you is not your examiner. OET states that "the entire session is recorded and will be marked by trained OET assessors after the test" and that "the interlocutor does not assess your performance." The Speaking page adds that the audio is assessed by two official OET assessors. So the friendly voice asking about your ward has no vote on your grade. They are your scene partner and your timekeeper.

Third, the criteria themselves are written to attach to the role plays. Open OET's Speaking assessment criteria and level descriptors and the clinical communication section opens with the line "In the roleplay, there is evidence of the test taker…" before listing indicators from A1 (initiating the interaction appropriately) to E5. Linguistic criteria are banded 0–6, clinical communication 0–3, and per OET's Ultimate Guide to OET Speaking Part 1, "test-takers securing grade B (350) will have achieved predominantly scores of 5 out of 6 on each linguistic criteria and 2 out of 3 for the clinical communication criteria."

One honest nuance most guides skip: the session is recorded in full. Nothing published suggests assessors score your chat about your ward, and the criteria language points the other way — but "unscored" is not the same as "unheard". Behave as though a colleague is listening, because one is.

Why does OET bother with a warm-up at all? Because a human being is running the test. The Nursing and Midwifery Council's acceptance criteria for English tests include the requirement that "the speaking element is tested by a person and not via a computer test" — that human format is the reason OET is accepted, and a human conversation that opens cold with a scored role play would produce worse, less representative samples of your English.

OET speaking warm-up questions for nurses: 12 original examples

OET does not publish warm-up questions. Any page presenting "the official OET warm-up question list" is showing you a reconstruction. What is genuinely consistent — across prep providers and candidate accounts — is the territory: your professional life. EduBenchmark's page on the interlocutor's role describes questions such as how long you have been a nurse and what you find most challenging about it, adding that "there are no marks for these questions, so just answer them naturally."

The questions below are original examples written by us for rehearsal. They are not OET material and are not copied from any exam or provider. They are the shape you should practise, not the words you will hear.

• "Tell me a little about yourself and your work."
• "How long have you been working as a nurse?"
• "Which ward or unit are you based on at the moment?"
• "What made you decide to go into nursing?"
• "What does a typical shift look like for you?"
• "What part of the job do you enjoy most?"
• "What do you find most difficult about the work?"
• "Do you prefer working days or nights?"
• "Have you worked in more than one hospital?"
• "Are you studying anything alongside your job?"
• "Where would you like to be working in five years?"
• "Why are you taking this test?"

Notice what none of them require: no clinical knowledge, no vocabulary you would not use in a tea room, no opinion you have to defend. That is deliberate. The warm-up exists to get you talking, not to test you.

For nurses who want the ward conversations themselves rehearsed — anxious patients, handovers, discharge explanations — the scenario library in our English speaking practice for nurses guide runs deeper than any warm-up drill.

OET speaking warm-up questions for doctors and other professions

Doctors get the same conversation, aimed at medicine. Again, these are original examples written for practice, not exam material:

• "Can you tell me about your current role?"
• "What is your specialty, and how long have you worked in it?"
• "Is your hospital a large one? How many beds, roughly?"
• "What does a normal clinic day involve for you?"
• "What first attracted you to your specialty?"
• "What is the most rewarding part of your work?"
• "Which part of the job would you change if you could?"
• "Have you worked in both public and private settings?"
• "Are you planning to work abroad? Where?"
• "What are you doing to prepare for that move?"

OET runs profession-specific materials across twelve professions, so dentists, pharmacists, physiotherapists, radiographers, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, optometrists, podiatrists, veterinary surgeons and dietitians all get the same treatment with the nouns swapped:

• "How long have you been practising as a physiotherapist?"
• "What kind of patients do you usually see in your clinic?"
• "Do you work mostly with adults or with children?"
• "What made you choose pharmacy rather than medicine?"
• "Is your practice busy at this time of year?"
• "What would you like to specialise in next?"

If your English is fine in a corridor but disappears in a structured conversation, that is a small-talk problem, not a clinical one — our guide to office small talk in English trains the exact register the warm-up uses.

How long the warm-up lasts and why sources disagree

Here is where honest reporting matters. We could not find an official OET statement of how long the warm-up lasts. The pages that describe it — the test-day guide, the Speaking page, the at-home user guide — all describe it qualitatively ("a few questions", "a warm-up to help you feel comfortable") and quantify everything around it instead.

Two takeaways. Three minutes of card-reading time is the number OET states repeatedly — trust that one and plan your reading around it. And when a site tells you the warm-up lasts exactly three minutes, it is estimating; treat one to three minutes as a planning range and let the interlocutor manage the clock, which is their job.

There is one more practical difference worth knowing, because it changes how your voice reaches the assessor. Taken at a venue, you speak through a headset after a microphone check. Taken at home over Zoom, the official user guide bans headsets and earphones of any type, along with phones, watches and dictionaries, and asks you to bring blank paper, a pen, a label-free clear water bottle and a mirror of roughly 30cm × 30cm for the room check. Different audio path, different room, same warm-up.

Why freezing in the warm-up follows you into the graded part

No published OET data measures this, so treat what follows as mechanism rather than statistics — but the mechanism is not subtle.

The graded part begins about three minutes after the warm-up ends. Warm-up, then card 1, then three minutes of silent reading, then you speak — and that sentence is scored. There is no second settling period. Whatever state your voice is in when the small talk stops is roughly the state it will be in when role play 1 starts.

The band descriptors punish exactly what nerves produce. Read OET's published level descriptors for fluency: band 4 is "uneven flow, with some repetition, especially in longer utterances" and "delivery may be staccato or too fast/slow"; band 3 adds "frequent pauses and repetitions indicate searching for words" and "excessive use of fillers". None of those describe missing English. They describe a nervous speaker who has not yet found their pace. A candidate whose grammar would earn a 5 can hand in a 4 on delivery alone.

Your first thirty scored seconds are relationship building. The clinical communication indicators start at A1, "initiating the interaction appropriately (greeting, introductions, nature of interview)", followed by A2 attentive and respectful attitude and A4 showing empathy. That opening — greeting a stranger warmly, in character, at a natural pace — is the hardest thing to do cold, and the warm-up is the free rehearsal for it.

And there is a physical layer. Speaking is muscular. Most candidates arrive having barely spoken English aloud that morning — many arrived thirty minutes early, sat in a waiting area in silence, and then were asked to be warm and fluent on command. Voice, breathing and jaw need a minute of use. That is what the warm-up is for; candidates who answer in three-word bursts to "get it over with" throw away the only free minute in the test.

The practical fix is not clever. It is having spoken English out loud, conversationally, in the days before the test — so that the warm-up is your fifth conversation of the week rather than your first in a month. That is a habit problem, and habits need a partner who is available at 11pm after a shift. Start a free 5-minute session tonight →

How to answer: length, register and the three-sentence shape

Since nothing here is scored, the aim is not a good answer. The aim is a warm, connected, mid-length answer that gets your voice running. A shape that works:

1. Sentence one — role and setting. "I'm a nurse. I've been working on a surgical ward in Kochi for about six years."
2. Sentence two — one concrete detail. "It's a twenty-eight bed unit, so most of my shifts are post-operative care and discharge planning."
3. Sentence three — something forward-looking. "I'm hoping to move to the UK next year, which is why I'm sitting the test."

Around twenty to thirty seconds. Long enough for your pace to normalise, short enough that you are not performing.

A few rules that come from how the section is built, not from opinion:

• Do not give one-word answers. "Six years." wastes your own rehearsal time and forces the interlocutor to keep hunting for a follow-up.
• Do not recite a memorised speech either. A rehearsed monologue produces the flat, rushed delivery you are trying to avoid, and it does not respond to what you were actually asked.
• Use the moment to calibrate. Listen to the interlocutor's accent and speed. If you cannot catch something now, that is exactly when to say "sorry, could you repeat that?" — free, unscored, and better than doing it for the first time mid-role-play.
• Check your audio. If your own voice sounds distant or the connection stutters, say so during the warm-up. OET's guidance is that the interlocutor manages the flow of the test; this is the moment to raise it.
• Answer as yourself, not in role. You are not the nurse-in-the-scenario yet. That character starts when the card does.
• Stay in professional register. Friendly, not familiar. It is the same register the role play needs, which is another reason it is useful rehearsal.

How to practise the warm-up alone in five minutes a day

Warm-up practice is unusually easy to do solo, because the content is your own life. What is hard to do alone is the feedback — you cannot hear your own hesitation. Here is the routine we would run, and how SpeakShark fits it:

1. Ninety seconds of cold talking, once a day. Open a session and answer one professional question with no preparation. The point is the transition from silence to speech — the exact transition that goes wrong on test day.
2. Rotate the twelve questions above. Never in the same order, never scripted. If you can hear yourself reciting, change the question.
3. Let phoneme-level feedback catch what you cannot hear. SpeakShark flags mispronounced sounds during the conversation rather than in a report afterwards, which matters because intelligibility in OET's descriptors is about pronunciation and prosody in connected speech, not isolated words.
4. Use a teacher whose accent matches your destination. The free tier includes Sarah (American), 3 sessions of 5 minutes a day, 64 topics and 7-day history, with no card. Premium — $10/month or $69/year, about $5.75 a month, on the pricing page — adds unlimited 10-minute sessions with unlimited turns, 320 topics, advanced feedback, full history and all four teachers: American, British, Australian and Canadian. NHS-bound candidates should be rehearsing against the British teacher.
5. Let the memory do the coaching. This is the part no competitor in this niche does: the AI teacher carries your recurring mistakes, your level and your topics across sessions, so Thursday's session already knows the sound you flattened on Monday. Apps that meet you as a stranger every day make you restart every day.
6. Then move to the scored part. Once the warm-up feels automatic, spend your sessions on role plays instead — Role Play mode handles scenario practice, and our guides to OET Speaking role-play cards and OET Speaking criteria and scoring tell you what those five minutes are being marked on.

How we researched this guide

Every factual claim above comes from a page we opened in July 2026, linked in place so you can check it.

Primary sources (OET, the test maker): the test-day guidance for the OET Test on Computer dated 9 June 2026, for the warm-up statement, the three-minute card reading time, the recording, and the fact that the interlocutor does not assess; the Speaking sub-test page for the approximate 20-minute length, the two five-minute role plays, assessment by two official assessors and the grade B profile; the criteria overview from 5 November 2024 for the criteria definitions and three minutes of preparation per role play; the Speaking sub-test online user guide for the at-home format, the "questions to help you relax" wording and the equipment rules; the assessment criteria and level descriptors for band wording and the "In the roleplay…" framing; and the Ultimate Guide to OET Speaking Part 1 for the 0–6 and 0–3 scales.

Regulator source: the NMC's accepted English language tests page, last updated 8 March 2024, for the requirement that speaking be tested by a person, and for the OET grades the NMC asks of nurses — B (350 or above) in listening, reading and speaking, with C+ (300 or above) in writing.

Prep-provider sources, treated as claims rather than facts: EduBenchmark on the interlocutor and on the sub-test structure, and Gradding's speaking sample page updated 6 June 2025. Where these disagree with OET or with each other — most visibly on preparation time — we show both figures with their source.

What we deliberately did not do: publish a warm-up duration, or reproduce a "real" warm-up question bank. No official source states a length, and OET publishes no warm-up questions, so every example question on this page was written by us for rehearsal and is not exam material.

SpeakShark is a speaking-improvement tool, not an exam-prep provider, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by OET, Cambridge Boxhill Language Assessment, the NMC, or any other exam body or regulator named on this page.

When the warm-up is not your problem

An honest guide has to say where this advice stops working.

If your English sits at band 3 on the descriptors, warm-up polish will not move your grade. When persistent grammar inaccuracies are intrusive and pronunciation causes serious strain for the listener, a smooth introduction changes nothing about the five scored minutes that follow. That is a months-long build of daily speaking, and it is worth knowing your honest starting point first — our free English speaking level test gives you a baseline before you book a test date.

If you run out of time or lose the thread inside the role play, work on the card, not the chat. The failure mode there is structure and prioritisation during those three preparation minutes — covered in OET Speaking role-play cards.

If the hard part is a specific scenario type, rehearse that scenario. Delivering difficult news, for example, is its own skill under pressure, with its own phrasing and its own silences: see OET Speaking and breaking bad news.

If your hands shake and your mind goes blank regardless of preparation, that is anxiety, not English. Warm-up drilling helps at the margin, but graded exposure is the actual treatment — the method is in overcoming the fear of speaking English.

And if you need exam-specific coaching on card content and assessor expectations, go to OET. Its official sample tests, criteria PDFs and preparation courses are the authority on the exam. Tools like ours make your spoken English stronger and more automatic; they do not teach you the test. If a single stubborn sound is your bottleneck, a dedicated phoneme drill app such as ELSA Speak is sharper at that narrow job than any conversational tool, including SpeakShark. For general scenario rehearsal beyond healthcare, see English role-play scenarios for speaking practice.

FAQ

Nobody fails OET because of the warm-up. Plenty of candidates lose half a band in role play 1 because they were still finding their voice when the scoring started — and the warm-up is the free minute that stops that happening. Use it, and arrive having already spoken English out loud this week.

Start your free daily speaking session on SpeakShark → — three sessions a day, no card, with pronunciation feedback while you speak and a teacher that remembers what you got wrong yesterday.

All OET formats, timings and criteria verified in July 2026 from the official pages and PDFs linked above; OET updates its guidance, so confirm the current format on oet.com before your test date. Every example question on this page is original practice material written by us, not OET exam content.