DELE B2 Speaking Exam: How to Prepare for Each Tarea and Actually Pass

The DELE B2 oral exam is the part candidates lose sleep over, and usually for the wrong reason. People assume they fail on vocabulary. In practice, most marks are lost on structure: a monologue that runs out after ninety seconds, an answer that never actually takes a position, a candidate who treats the examiner’s follow-up questions as an attack rather than the easiest marks in the exam.

The format is published and stable, so you can prepare for each task specifically. Check the current specifications on the Instituto Cervantes site before you sit it — details do change — but the shape below is what you should be rehearsing.

The shape of the exam

Three tasks, roughly fifteen minutes in the room, with about twenty minutes of preparation beforehand for the first two. You go in with notes you have made yourself, which is a bigger advantage than most candidates use.

• Tarea 1 — you are given a situation with several proposed solutions. You assess them in a monologue, then discuss with the examiner.
• Tarea 2 — you describe a photograph, imagine what is happening and why, then answer questions about it.
• Tarea 3 — you react to the results of a survey, saying whether they surprise you and how they compare with your own country or experience. No preparation time for this one.

Tarea 1: have an opinion, then defend it

The commonest failure here is neutrality. Candidates list the options, say each has advantages and disadvantages, and stop. That reads as evasion and costs you on coherence.

Use the preparation time to pick your favourite option and your least favourite, and prepare one concrete reason for each. Then structure the monologue in four moves: frame the problem, reject one or two options with reasons, argue for your choice, concede one drawback.

Phrases that do real work:

• Desde mi punto de vista, la mejor opción sería…
• Esta propuesta me parece poco realista, porque…
• Ahora bien, hay que tener en cuenta que…
• Si tuviera que elegir, me quedaría con… — and note the subjunctive, which examiners are listening for
• No creo que sea la solución más eficaz — again, subjunctive after a negated opinion

Those last two matter. B2 is where the subjunctive stops being optional, and two or three correct uses signal your level faster than any amount of vocabulary.

Tarea 2: describe less, speculate more

Candidates who describe a photograph object by object run dry in a minute. The marks are in speculation, because speculation is where the interesting grammar lives.

Spend thirty seconds on what you can see, then move to what you cannot: who these people are, what just happened, what will happen next, how they feel.

• Parece que están celebrando algo
• Es probable que acaben de llegar
• Supongo que serán compañeros de trabajo — the future for conjecture, a very B2 move
• A juzgar por sus caras, diría que…
• Si yo estuviera en esa situación, me sentiría…

Also learn five hedges for when you cannot name an object: una especie de…, algo parecido a…, no sé cómo se llama, pero sirve para…. Talking around a word smoothly scores better than stopping.

Tarea 3: compare, don’t just agree

You get survey data and are asked to react. The structure that works: say whether the figure surprises you, explain why, compare it to your own country or experience, then generalise.

• Me sorprende que tanta gente diga que…
• En mi país ocurre justo lo contrario
• Esto tiene que ver con…
• Diría que la tendencia va en aumento

There is no preparation time here, so what you rehearse in advance is the frame, not the content.

What they are actually marking

Broadly four things: coherence (does your answer have a shape), fluency (do you keep going without long silences), range (do you use varied structures, or the same three), and accuracy. Note the order in which they bite. A candidate who speaks continuously with a few errors usually outscores a careful one who pauses to self-correct every sentence.

So the single most useful habit is this: when you make a mistake, keep going. Correcting yourself once is fine and shows awareness. Correcting yourself constantly destroys the fluency mark and the examiner’s sense that you can hold a conversation.

A four-week routine

• Weekly: one full timed mock, recorded. Listen back once — painful, and the fastest diagnostic you will ever get.
• Daily, five minutes: describe one photograph aloud. Any photograph. Phone gallery, newspaper, anything.
• Twice a week: take a news headline and argue both sides for two minutes each. This builds the Tarea 1 muscle directly.
• Ongoing: keep a list of your ten connectors and actually use them — por otro lado, en cambio, de hecho, por lo tanto, a pesar de que.

If the subjunctive is the thing standing between you and a confident Tarea 1, start with our guide to the Spanish subjunctive without the fear.

Where to go next

The one part of this you cannot do alone is the conversation. You can rehearse monologues in the shower, but the follow-up questions — the part where the examiner pushes back and you have to respond unprepared — need another person.

Timed mock conversations with a native tutor are the highest-value preparation there is, and you don’t need a course to get them: book a single Spanish lesson on Parlazo, pay for that lesson, no subscription.