hello hello hello everybody welcome to toefl talk a brand new video series that's going to help
you pass the toefl speaking section and you can grab your coffee we're going to have a great class
and we're going to be talking initially about the toefl section what is it
what does it consist of and then after we're going to listen to some examples of students who do
question one for the speaking and i'll be giving some tips and observations there so are you ready
go grab that coffee let's go so when we're talking about the toefl there are two things two choices
that you have you can either do the test at home the home test or you can do it at a test center
the pros there's no noise because it's your own environment and if you have a quiet apartment or a
quiet house then that's going to be the best place to do the test we sometimes can experience some
distractions when you're doing the test at a test center there are other students who might
be talking while you're trying to concentrate on the reading they might be typing very loudly
and that can be difficult to concentrate of course you're going to need a camera to show the proctor
who is giving you the test uh before you do the test before you start it they will do a
threes they'll ask you to do a 360 around your workstation to make sure that everything is
safe and secure for the test one of the cons of doing the test at home is that you can't use a
headset yes and you have to use the microphone the built-in microphone on your laptop now ways that
you could get around that of course would be to buy some usb speakers and to buy a usb microphone
if you do end up using your laptop for the home test what i advise is check the recording
the internal mic on your laptop to make sure that it's good quality that you can't hear the fan on
your laptop that you're not too far away those things are very important to get the best quality
recording of your voice a few other things i want to mention about the home test is that when
you're doing your note taking in case you don't know is that you'll have to write on transparent
a transparent plastic sheet with an erasable marker so you need to get used to that kind of
note taking so you're going to have to weigh your options some people live in noisy neighborhoods
they have noisy neighbors maybe your neighbors doing a renovation next in the apartment next to
you or above you so you want to be sure that your home environment is going to be nice and quiet the
day of the test so for the toefl speaking we have four questions now used to be six isn't that nice
now it's only four and the first question is to explain a choice the second question is to explain
a campus situation the third is an academic lecture and the fourth is an academic lecture also
so we're going to focus in toefl talk one here today about the first question explaining a choice
and one of the most important things you need to remember is that this is very short you only
have 15 seconds to prepare 45 seconds to answer so you're really going to need to develop the habit
you're going to need to develop a neural pathway so that you can automatically come up with
answers initially it may take longer but practice makes perfect i've seen this with
a lot of my students is that we practice this all the time and on top of that many
of the questions that you practice often repeat themselves on the real day of the test one of my
other important points for question one is you want to simplify your answer
what do i mean by that in the choice question you're telling the reviewers the raters
what is your choice and why you prefer that now there are two ways to do that one is the
risky way which is to say well i don't like b blah blah blah and i like a because of blah blah blah
that's one way it's possible if you can show that your choice is much stronger a much easier way to
do it the one way i would suggest is that you make a choice of two or three options
and you give two or three supporting points simplify it that is the best formula in my opinion
now another tip that i can give you is with discourse markers these are extremely important
not just for yourself but also for the person who's rating your score this is a gps that will
give you marketing more points so that you don't get lost and the person who's listening to you
doesn't get lost when he's rating your speaking so now we're going to take a look at a sample
question and two sample answers some people who unexpectedly receive a large amount of money spend
it on practical things while others spend it for pleasure only which do you think is better and why
if a person receives a large amount of money
i believe it's better for him or her to use it for practical things rather than on pleasure only
because there's been a lot of cases with people who won the lottery and they spent
almost all the money for their own pleasure and once they finish spending then they don't have
any more money to live the same kind of luxurious lifestyle and at that point a lot of people have
lost their jobs or kind of got eaten over by all the money and all the greed that's involved
so i believe we should just spend it on practical things so this answer was good
but it was incomplete and i'm going to be talking about that in a second so first off how are they
going to evaluate your speaking well essentially they're going to be looking at your pronunciation
and fluidity if you're speaking flows your grammar and vocabulary and the structure of
your answer if you're able to organize your ideas your argument your explanation her pace was good
her fluidity was excellent her pronunciation was really good as well
so she starts off well she starts talking about why she doesn't like one of the choices
and she uses some great vocabulary here when she used the co-location luxurious lifestyle also at
that point she does run into some trouble when she says that uh when people lose their jobs they get
eaten over i've never heard that one before and she also uses the word greed very context specific
word so because of her pronunciation and the use of vocabulary grammar was fine too it was a good
answer but it's not a great answer and the reason for that is that her choice she didn't say why
what were the reasons for her choice she said the the reasons why she would not choose the other
one so it's an incomplete answer now we're going to listen to another answer i think
uh what's behind it for pleasure only is better um my reason is that first um because now the
knife is so stressful if you can if you can buy something or do something to relax is so important
and second pleasure is very important for every people if if someone is always happy
he or she will have a longer or happier life
so first off the thing that really threw me off listening to this answer and i had to listen to
it more than one time i'm not going to lie and when i have to do that it's already not
a good sign i'm used to listening to people who have different accents around the world
every day i've been doing that for many years and in this case i struggled so we have for example
now knife is so stressful knife is so stressful actually i'm afraid of knives but i know that's
not what she wanted to say she wanted to say life so this is a common pronunciation challenge for
some chinese speakers particularly by the way if you need some pronunciation tips i have a playlist
for many different nationalities many different videos for people from around the world yeah
buy or do something to relax is so important so buying or doing something to relax is so important
okay she's going in the right direction here but she didn't give any examples she didn't do what
i say to flesh things out a little bit to give more detail so it's there but a little sketchy
once again she's in her next point she says pleasure is important so try to avoid using
the same words over and over again so she says important important that gets a little repetitive
and you could use other things like pleasure is essential pleasure is something that people
really need you can find other ways of saying it she also says for every people every person
if someone is always happy he or she will have a longer or happier life okay it's once again it's
it's another good example enough it's sufficiently different from her first point i guess and
it's okay but once again it's not fleshed out she doesn't give examples and it's very general very
sketchy so overall her answer is too superficial that speaking is choppy it lacks fluidity and the
intonation is also poor i can tell you from a lot of my experience that you can have a good answer
a good structured answer and if your pronunciation is not up to par if you're making some mistakes
like the ones i described everybody has them in your their own language that can be the reason why
you are not getting the speaking score that you deserve okay everybody i hope that this toefl talk
one was useful for you did you finish your coffee yet that we started drinking at the beginning of
this lesson and i will be doing more toefl talk videos i have lots of experience doing this and
if you would like me to do a writing series that's another thing i do with my private students you
let me know in your comments if you would like to watch more toefl videos you can do that here you
can also subscribe to my channel here if you need private toefl lessons you can contact me at the
link below this video or follow me on my social networks if you're one of my other students that
studies with me for other subjects like general english business english pronunciation i hope that
this lesson was useful for you too and we will see you in our next toefl talk lesson bye everybody