This year's Sec 4s sit their oral from 13 July. The 20% they are chasing this week was mostly decided by habits built in Secondary 3, and that is good news for the next cohort.
By Marcus Toh · 2026-07-07
The 1184 syllabus makes the oral a two part conversation: a Planned Response to a video clip, then a Spoken Interaction with the examiners, together worth 20% of the grade. This year's Secondary 4s sit theirs from 13 July, and here is the uncomfortable truth their juniors should learn from: a conversation cannot be crammed. Vocabulary, opinions and composure are compound interest skills, and Secondary 3 is where the compounding has room to work.
None of this requires extra hours in Sec 4. That is the point: the Sec 3 who builds these four habits spends the actual oral season doing light maintenance while their classmates cram phrases, and the gap shows in the room. The tactics for the exam itself, the pause phrases, the structure, the delivery, are all in How to Win in Oral, and the format details sit in our format guide.
Every July I watch two kinds of students walk into the oral. One kind spent three weeks memorising phrases they hope will fit, and you can hear the seams. The other kind has been talking about the world at the dinner table for a year, and the examiner is just one more adult to talk to. The second kind was not born confident, they were given reps.
So if your child is in Secondary 3 now, you are holding the cheapest advantage in the O-Level. No tuition required to start: one news story discussed a week, one opinion defended at dinner, one story told properly out loud. Do that for a year and next July the oral stops being an exam and becomes a conversation your child has already had a hundred times, and that is exactly how the students who score describe it afterwards.
The syllabus splits Paper 4's 30 marks evenly: 15 marks for the Planned Response and 15 marks for the Spoken Interaction, so the discussion with the examiners is worth exactly as much as the prepared response, which is why conversational comfort matters as much as preparation.
The paper runs about 20 minutes per candidate, including 10 minutes of preparation time, during which the candidate views the video clip and plans a response of up to 2 minutes. Half the exam window is thinking time, and students trained to use it deliberately hold a real edge.
No. The syllabus states candidates will not be asked any questions about what people say in the video clip: the Spoken Interaction is a discussion on a topic broadly related to the clip, so the preparation should focus on forming views about the theme, not memorising the clip's contents.