Study secrets of students who get 26+ on TOEFL® speaking

Make a schedule that requires you to speak -- A LOT.

I haven't met you or listened to you speak English and andobviously I don't really know you. But I do know that if you still do not have your target speaking score, then you probably do not speak enough English every day. Students who get their target scores on TOEFL speak English every chance they get (at work, with friends, or even just while shopping).

But they also create plans to speak English and make TOEFL-style responses for 10 to 15 hours for every point they lack on their score. So, let's imagine you took TOEFL before and got a speaking score of 23, but you want 26. Well, first, we should raise your goal to 27 (because it's less risky and if you miss, you can still get 26). This means you want to improve your speaking score by 4 points, so you should aim to speak TOEFL-style responses for 60 hours. Yes! 60 hours.

At first, 60 hours might seem like a crazy number, but if you make significant mistakes with grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation, it can take weeks -- sometimes 2-4 months -- to eliminate 85-95% of your errors. People who score 26 and higher sound "perfect", well, almost perfect.

Imitate high-quality model responses for TOEFL speaking.

The strongest and fastest way you can learn is through imitation. When you learned to speak as a child, you spent a long time quietly watching your parents and you developed a perfect accent, grammar, and a wide vocabulary.

When I first taught TOEFL speaking, I didn't realize the importance of imitation and I tried to make my students speak without giving them a great example to follow. What I discovered is that you actually improve much, much faster if your teacher, demonstrates really high-scoring TOEFL responses.

It all depends on what your speaking target score is. If you need a lower score (like 20-24 points, for example, the quality of the examples you follow is not that important). However, if you need 26 or higher, look for a teacher who got 30 on TOEFL speaking like I did. This way, you know that you can trust the examples of TOEFL speaking you'll hear. Ultimately, your own responses will reflect the speech patterns you model. Because of that, you will be more successful if you learn from high-quality responses.

Get corrected by an English speaker you trust.

The last really important step is to make sure that you are not making mistakes when you speak English for TOEFL.

Most TOEFL students are so stressed out, that they do not accurately or confidently identify their own mistakes when they speak English. Of course they can feel when they speak well or poorly, but they do not often accurately diagnose their own grammar or vocabulary mistakes. Usually, people need extra help identifying and fixing pronunciation mistakes.

TheTOEFL iBT®Test: Improving Your Listening Skills

Advice for Listening

Congratulations! You have excellent listening skills in English. To maintain and enhance your solid skills, here are some points to keep in mind for the future.

  1. Use the resources in your community to practice listening to English.
  2. Visit places in your community where you can hear English spoken.
  3. Go to an English school, an embassy or an English-speaking Chamber of Commerce.
  4. Go to a museum and take an audio tour in English.
  5. Follow a guided tour in English of your city.
  6. Call or visit a hotel where tourists stay and get information in English about room rates, hotel availability or hotel facilities.
  7. Call and listen to information recorded in English, such as a movie schedule, a weather report or information about an airplane flight.
  8. Watch or listen to programs recorded in English.
  9. Watch television programs.
  10. CNN, the Discovery Channel or National Geographic
  11. Watch movies, soap operas or situation comedies
  12. Rent videos or go to a movie in English.
  13. Listen to a book on tape in English.
  14. Listen to music in English and then check your accuracy by finding the lyrics on the Internet (e.g.,
  15. Go to Internet sites to practice listening.
  16. National Public Radio (
  17. CBS News (
  18. Randall's Cyber Listening Lab (
  19. BBC World Service.com Learning English (
  20. Get CDs with full-length lectures. Full-length lectures/presentations are available from UC Berkeley.
  21. Practice speaking English with others.
  22. Look for a conversation partner and exchange language lessons with an English speaker who wants to learn your language.
  23. Begin to prepare for academic situations.
  24. Visit academic classes, cultural centers, or museums where people are invited to talk in English about their work.
  25. Before you listen to a lecture in English, read assigned chapters or background information on academic topics.
  26. Visit lectures on a wide variety of topics.
  27. Record lectures or presentations and replay them several times.
  28. Listen to different types of talks on various topics, including subjects in which you have limited or little background.
  29. Listen to short sections several times until you understand the main points and the flow of ideas.
  30. Stop the recording in the middle and predict what will come next.
  31. Practice listening to longer lectures.
  32. Become familiar with theorganization or structureof lectures.
  33. Pay attention to the structure.
  34. lecture or presentation — introduction, body, and conclusion
  35. narrative story — beginning, middle, and end
  36. Learn to recognize different styles of organization.
  37. theory and evidence
  38. cause and effect
  39. steps of a process
  40. comparison of two things
  41. Think carefully about thepurposeof a lecture.
  42. Try to answer the question, "What is the professor trying to accomplish in this lecture?"
  43. Write down only the information that you hear. Be careful not to interpret information based on your personal understanding or knowledge of the topic.
  44. Answer questions based on what was actually discussed in the talk
  45. Develop a note-taking strategy to help you organize information into a hierarchy of main points and supporting details.
  46. Make sure your notes follow the organization of the lecture.
  47. Listen for related ideas and relationships within a lecture and make sure you summarize similar information together.
  48. Use your notes to write a summary.
  49. Listen for signals that will help you understand the organization of a talk, connections between ideas, and the importance of ideas.
  50. Listen for expressions and vocabulary that tell you the type of information being given.
  51. Think carefully about the type of information that these phrases show.
  52. opinion (I think, It appears that, It is thought that)
  53. theory (In theory)
  54. inference (therefore, then)
  55. negatives (not, words that begin with "un," "non," "dis," "a")
  56. fillers (non-essential information) (uh, er, um)
  57. Identify digressions (discussion of a different topic from the main topic) or jokes that are not important to the main lecture [It’s okay not to understand these!]
  58. Listen for signal words and phrases that connect ideas in order to recognize the relationship between ideas.
  59. Think carefully about the connection between ideas that these words show.
  60. reasons (because, since)
  61. results (as a result, so, therefore, thus, consequently)
  62. examples (for example, such as)
  63. comparisons (in contrast, than)
  64. an opposing idea (on the other hand, however)
  65. another idea (furthermore, moreover, besides)
  66. a similar idea (similarly, likewise)
  67. restatements of information (in other words, that is)
  68. conclusions (in conclusion, in summary)
  69. Pay attention to intonation and other ways that speakers indicate that information is important.
  70. Listen foremotionsexpressed through changes in intonation or stress.
  71. Facial expressions or word choices can indicate excitement, anger, happiness, frustration, etc.
  72. Listen how native speakers divide long sentences into "thought groups" to make them easier to understand. (A thought group is a spoken phrase or short sentence. Thought groups are separated by short pauses.)
  73. Listen to sets of thought groups to make sure you get the whole idea of the talk
  74. Listen for important key words and phrases which are often ...
  75. repeated
  76. paraphrased (repeated information but using different words)
  77. said louder and clearer
  78. stressed
  79. Listen for pauses between important points.
  80. In a lecture, pay attention to words that are written on the board.

References