In a new episode of The TOEFL Podcast, Paul Austin, head instructor at TOEFL Speaking Teacher speaks about the five skills you need to master to get 26+ on the TOEFL Speaking section.
First, Paul tells us about his work and how he created his website TOEFL Speaking Teacher. He noticed that many students struggled with the TOEFL Speaking section, and there were very few good resources.
Also as he started to work with the students on the Speaking section, he noticed that a lot of students needed to get 26+ on the TOEFL Speaking section and tried to figure out what is required to get 26 on TOEFL Speaking.
As a result of his experience, he found the five skills you need to master to get 26+ on the TOEFL Speaking section.
The first skill is Fluency. Fluency is your ability to deliver a response smoothly, with minimum interruptions.
Skill number two is TOEFL Speaking Tactics: Timing, Content, Organization, and Note-taking.
The third thing Words and Phrases. You want to show the evaluator that you can speak English well, you are not using templates, you are using natural sounding English.
Skill number four is your Accent and Intonation. It´s the most challenging one to improve because it takes more time.
Skill number five is your Pace of Speech. You need to speak fast enough, 100-105 words on Question types 1 and 2 and about 125 in Question types 3 to 6.
A bonus skill that affects everything is Confidence. You really need to work on improving your Confidence to get 26+.
The advice that Paul gives is not to focus on the score you need to get but focus on improving those five skills. Then you’ll be good enough to get 26+
Also, Paul emphasizes, that the part of getting 26 is accepting that you haven’t been perfect in the past, but now it’s time to change, now it’s time to get a professional help.
5 Skills You Need To Master To Get 26+ On TOEFL Speaking - Transcript
Welcome to the TOEFL
podcast where we give you all of the hints, tips and secrets you need to know
to score one hundred plus on the TOEFL exam. I'm your host Paul Austin, head
tutor at TOEF Speaking Teacher and I'm here to help you succeed in your next TOEFL
test.
Welcome back to the
toefl podcast listeners, we are so excited to have you here today and to learn
about the 5 skills that you need to master to get 26+ plus on the TOEFL speaking
section now some of you may be familiar with the work that I've done in terms
of the toefl test. If you haven't just a brief introduction about what my work
has been like for the past couple of years, you know when I first started the
toefl speaking teacher website a couple years ago I only had one or two years
of experience with toefl and I specifically created this site because I noticed that
there were many students who struggled with the toefl speaking section. As you
probably know the productive skills Speaking and Writing are the most
challenging skills for a total student to master and so I thought you know I'll
just focus on the speaking section, I’ll provide private lessons, I’ll provide
extra help for people so that they can do well on the speaking section and as I
started to work with students on the speaking section I noticed that a lot of
students needed to get 26+ on the toefl speaking section and this 26+ was for
pharmacists, physical therapists, nurses,
teachers, doctors, dentists then of course you know people who needed to get
their MBA or go to graduate school look at their PhD or their LLM and there
were a lot of students who needed to get 26+ on toefl speaking and there
weren't a lot of resources, in fact they were basically zero resources that
were widely read and well known amongst the online community. You know you have
note full as I've spoken about with other students and as I spoke about on this
toefl podcast, their advice for the reading, listening sometimes the writing
section is pretty good but their advice for the speaking section is bad, it’s
the best way to put it, it's incorrect and since they have the most popular
YouTube channel, they get the most traffic people say I'll look it's work for
other people it will work for me too I'm unfortunately if you were to ask them
the percentages of the students that they would help for the speaking section
specifically to get 26 it would be probably somewhere between 20 and 30 % and
maybe even lower so you always wanna look at percentage.
Anyway that's
getting a bit off track because there weren't any good resources I started to
work with since I started to try to figure out what is required to get 26 on
toefl speaking because this is a challenging thing to do, it is not easy and
after about two years of private lessons, now specific to 26 on toefl speaking
I've come up with a program more or less, and this program is you know I do have a self-study
course curriculum called get twenty six placental for speaking that's available
for purchase it is a premium product but it basically has then all of the skills
that I'm gonna tell you about today it has all the details on them audio files,
video files, fleshed out exercises that you can use at home all of those things
are in the cream of course but in today's podcast I just wanted to give you a
taste for what those five skills are that you need to master to get 26+ on
toefl speaking so let's get started without kind of waiting any longer and at
the end of the 5 skills I'm going to tell you one bonus skill that you
definitely need to master or understand well if you want to get 26+ speaking
and this bonus skill I see 90% of students struggle with probably 90 to 95% of
struggle with this bonus schools would definitely stay on in time to hear the
bonus skill so the first skill right let's get into it guys the first skill is
Fluency you need to have excellent fluency if you want to get 26+ on toefl speaking. What does that mean? you know so we say the
word fluency what does that mean when you're actually giving a response on the
TOEFL speaking section well fluency is your ability to deliver a response
smoothly with minimal interruptions from point A to point B so for example the
question one you have forty five seconds to get that response should start with
confidence in the first five to ten seconds start smoothly you should go the
full time forty four forty five seconds with minimal interruptions of
hesitation I say no more than two or three hesitations or interruptions in your
response if you want to get 26 on toefl speaking so what do we count as a
hesitation or an interruption? Well the most common one is going to be the word
mmm or ahhh so if you record your responses and you listen to those responses
and you notice a lot I have eight mmms and ahhhs in this response, well you need to minimize
those, you need to get those down so that's the first one mmms and ahhhs.
The second type of
interruption is often when we repeat ourselves so this happens with people who maybe
have some issues with stuttering which are brought on by a lack of confidence
and being nervous and stressed out so if you find yourself repeating words
stuttering over words you would also count that as an interruption and you want
to minimize those and sometimes those can be very challenging because sometimes
the student also stutters in their native tongue and that's something that's
difficult just to eliminate right away so if that's a problem for you I highly recommend
hiring a professional, it could be one of our teachers, it could be someone
else who will help you to minimize the stuttering in your response so we have
mmms and ahhhs, we have stuttering, we also have general pauses and breaks and
kind of drawing words out so I worked with one student who, she's from Dallas
Texas and she really struggle because to give her brain more time to think she
would often drag words out very long so she's say you know personally I think
that the doctor should blablabla instead of just saying like that person I
think the doctor should go to Chicago she was a personallyyyy, I think the
doctorrrrrr should go to Chicagooooo and she would draw out those kind of the
ends of the words to give herself more time to be able to think about what she
wanted to say next. We fixed that, we improved it and she went from 23 to 26 on
toefl speaking and we also worked on some other things but that was one of the
main things that we worked on so to minimize also than drawing any words out you
want to speak clearly you want to speak quickly and you want to get from one
point to the next. So that’s skill number one, skill number one is fluency
let's go on to skill number two guys skill number two is going to be the toefl
speaking tactics so the toefl speaking tactics, there are four of them there's
your timing, there's your content, there is your organization and there's
finally your note taking and these I call these the total speaking tactics
because these are just the things that you need to do specific to taking the
toefl speaking section you know if you were doing any other thing if you're
going to have coffee with a friend or you were going to give a presentation
about a certain topic to a group of people or if you were going to speak to a
client or a person is coming into your work you don't need to worry about these
things you don't need to worry about taking notes beforehand or how you're
organizing your response or that you know how much time you're talking but
because we're in the toefl speaking section you know you need to you need to be
able to do those things so toefl speaking tactics: timing, content, organization
and your note taking.
I'll say a couple
of things about these. Timing: for question type one and two you want it to be
forty four, forty five seconds, for question types three to six you want it to
be fifty eight, fifty nine or sixty seconds, easy enough and you just want to
work until you can hit that timing consistently, now content and organization
90 to 95 % of students who work with me we don't ever focus specifically on
content and organization, that's something that with enough practice and with
enough exposure to example responses, you won't have any problem with the content
and organization thought if you're struggling with content and organization, if
a teacher tells you that you are or if you kind of self-evaluate and determine
that you're struggling with it look at your notes, usually notes are the first
problem. If you want more advice on the notes then you can take a look at our
YouTube videos, ok master guide to question type one, master guide to question
type two, question type three I tell you how to take notes in those videos I
tell you how to take very good notes so improve that note taking process and
that is going to help you with your content and organization. The other thing
that will help you with content and organization is by listening to example
responses from students who have gotten 26+ for toefl speaking, this is one of
the best things that I include in our premium course to get 26+ for toefl
speaking, before I have students take the TOEFL, I have them record responses
and send them to me and then I save those responses and if they end up getting
26+ on toefl speaking which most of them do, I put those responses in my
premium course so that the students were coming through can actually hear what
a 26 response sounds like from a nonnative speaker and when you listen to those
again and again and again and again and again you have a very good
understanding for what you need to do to get 26 on the toefl speaking task in
terms of content and organization. One last note, a lot of students that come
to me they worry that their content and organization is not good enough, they
worry that it's preventing them from getting 26 on toefl speaking, typically
they're worrying about the wrong thing so if you're worried that your content
and organization is preventing you from getting 26, you are probably wrong. I
will repeat that if you're worried but the content and organization of your
responses is preventing you from getting 26 on toefl speaking you are probably
wrong it is probably something else that is probably your accent and intonation
it's probably the words and phrases you use and it might be your pace of speech
it could be your fluency but usually when students come to me their content and
organization is fine so if that's the case if you think that's preventing you from
getting 26, meet with me. Ok schedule TOEFL speaking response analysis which
will provide a link to below, we evaluate your responses and will actually tell
you what is the real thing that's preventing you from getting 26 on toefl speaking
for some students it is content organization but that's very rare typically
students want to believe that its content and organization because that you
know that's the easy one to fix that's the one they know how to fix but it's
usually not usually not the tactics it's usually not the content and
organization let's move on now okay so total speaking tactics timing content
organization and note taking.
The third thing I
get is going to be the words and phrases that you use, yes words and phrases
what are the actual words that are coming out of your mouth. First of all if
you're using templates and you expect to get 26 on toefl speaking you are
shooting yourself in the foot that's a really good idiom to look up, shooting
yourself in the foot. Don't use templates in the toefl speaking section when
humans communicate when native speakers talking English we do not speak like
robots me go to the store or talking with friends were ordering food at a
restaurant we don't have pre memorize phrases that we use. Why would you do
that and the toefl speaking section? You are trying to show the evaluator that
you can speak English well that is the entire point of taking the toefl
speaking test. Yes you want to get your MBA yes you want to go to graduate
school yes you want to get your PhD you want to you know work as a pharmacist
doctor, dentist, physical therapist, teacher but ultimately you need to prove
that you can speak English well in order to do those things and the toefl is
the medium for you to prove that so why would you speak like a robot on the
total speaking section? It doesn't make sense you want to show the evaluators
that you can speak English well so don't use templates don't try to memorize
formulas, spoken language is not A plus B equals C. It's not that simple you have to be able to
use conversational English at the able to speak English naturally okay so
that's the third thing our words and phrases so for not using templates what
you need to use is informal colloquial English, natural sounding English and
the best way to learn that, the best way to understand what that is by just
immersing yourself in as many natural kind of authentic listening resources as
possible: podcast, movies, TV shows, the radio, listen to those again and again
just notice and pay attention to how native speakers actually talk what it
what's the conversational English they don't use the word moreover for I still
chuckle have a good chuckle when I have a student come in who uses the word
moreover I've never use that word in my entire life. Ever. When I'm speaking English
I've written a couple times but I would never use that word to don't use it if
there's a word that a native speaker wouldn't use in conversation with other
people and you're trying to use it and that'll for speaking response, the
professor states that, get it out, eliminate it, it's not helping you. Ok, the
words and phrases, eliminate templates, use colloquial informal English. Skill
number four is your accent and intonation so your accent and this is probably
the biggest thing preventing students from getting 26, this is the real one so
where a lot of students think oh it's my content and my organization they come
to me and I say no it's your accent the reason they don't want to admit that
it's their accent the reason they don't want to have to accept the fact that it
is their accent is because that is the most challenging one to improve. That is
by far the most challenging thing to improve because it takes time because it
takes patience because it's typically not an overnight fix and in our day and
age in our society in the way that we live we have been trained to want to find
the shortest way possible, we have been trained to want to find a shortcut. Sometimes
it's just not possible sometimes you have to take the long way, the challenging
way and I see this most often with students who struggle with accent and
intonation so as part of accent, there are you know there are multiple areas of
accent there's your intonation which is the rhythm of the language, going high,
going low, taking pauses, speaking really fast and going from one word to the
another it's that type of rhythm that we look at for intonation but then
there's also pronunciation, how might actually saying phonetic sounds in the
English language and pronunciation takes, it can take anywhere from one to
three months to improve to get to a point where you can get 26 which is why
students don't want to accept that intonation, sorry they don't want to accept
that pronunciation, that accent is the reason they can't get 26 because they
don't want to study one to three months they want to say I want to be done with
this in two weeks I want to be done with this in three weeks. Now paradoxically,
that's a good word paradoxically because they try to shortcut their way to 26 because
they try to take the short way, it ends up taking them much longer to actually
get the score I've heard I've worked with so many students who have come to me
and then like yeah I've already taken the toefl 20 times they started out with
the same mindset as you well you know just take the short way I'll take the
shortcut in eventually I'll get lucky and I'll get this, it only be a couple
months, two months turns into three months three months turns into six months,
six months turns into one year, one year turns into three years and then all of
a sudden they've spent three to four thousand dollars on taking the test they
still haven't passed the gotten 26 on toefl speaking and they've lost all that
time and opportunity in terms of making extra money at their job so by trying
to take the short cut they've completely failed and actually extended how long
it's taking them, and if that's you that's no problem right, it’s part of
getting 26 is accepting that that's you accepting that you've made a mistake
accepting that you haven't been perfect in the past but that now it's time to
change now it's time to get professional help. If you need 26 on toefl speaking
and you've taken the test more than three times you need to hire someone who
can actually get you twenty six on toefl speaking who has a track record of
helping students get 26 on toefl speaking and not 20%, I'm talking 60 to 70 to 80 % like we have at Toefl Speaking Teacher so accent and
intonation is skill number four.
Skill number five
is your pace of speech and that one's pretty simple I tell students okay
fluency is great beautiful speaking tactics are great you using informal words
and phrases your accent and intonation is closer and closer to a native speaker
well then you just need to speak quick enough need to speak fast enough and I
tell them aim for 105 words in question type one and two, aim for about 135
words in question types three six so imagine these five skills like a pyramid
okay then I'm gonna provide a graphics you guys can see what I mean but skills
one and two fluency and toefl speaking tactics, those form the foundation of
the pyramid and first you need to make sure that those are well established
then once you've mastered those go to the next step of the pyramid which the
words and phrases you're using, once you eliminate the templates, once you use
in informal words and phrases then go ahead and go to the next step of the
pyramid which is your accent and intonation, work on your accent, work on your
intonation, then finally top of the pyramid is your pace of speech but if you
try to jump right if you try to say ah my fluency is fine and it's not fine and
you try to go work on words and phrases that's a recipe for disaster, you want
to first make sure that the foundation is very strong very strong because of
the foundation crumbles, if it doesn't go well everything else falls about it
so imagine that period will include a graphic below, one other thing the bonus
of course that I mentioned what is the one bonus for the skill that everyone
needs to master his confidence.
I have too many
students who come to me and say you know I can speak fine I can speak English
fine when I'm talking with a friend or when I'm having coffee with a friend or
when I'm at work like it's no problem but then I get into the toefl speaking
section then all of a sudden I can't function I can't give a response I'm too
nervous I'm too distracted the environment is challenging all these things are
difficult and I ask questions and I try to get into why that's the case and I
will record a full podcast episode about this but usually the reason that's the
case is because they lack confidence so the one bonus skill that affects
everything is confidence, you need to work on improving your confidence, there
are a number of ways to do that just system quick advice: focus not on the outcomes,
too many students focus and saying I need to get 26 I need to get 26 I need to
get 26 and because their focus is so outcome driven that causes a lot of stress
and anxiety when they go actually to take the test so kind of reverse that
mindset and instead of focusing on the outcome 26 on toefl speaking, I want you
to focus on the process I want you to focus on improving those five skills,
focus on what you can control to improve your fluency and improve your TOEFL
speaking tactics, improve your words and phrases, improve your accent, improve
your pace of speech and then do that and after time eventually, eventually you'll
be good enough to get 26 and then the outcome it's just a result of having
focused on the process. Ok the last thing, guys I'll make this very simple I
make this very clear if you have taken toefl for more than three times and you
have not gotten 26 on toefl speaking yet you are throwing away money, you’re throwing
away money on the actual total test fees, 190 dollars each time you take the
test you're throwing away money because for every month or two months or three
months that you're not getting 26 on toefl speaking you're literally losing
thousands of dollars in extra salary that's not an exaggeration. Pharmacists,
full pharmacists make about 90,000 more dollars per year, on a per month basis
that means they make somewhere between 6,000 or 7,000 more dollars per month,
for every month you don't get 26 in TOEFL speaking if you're a pharmacist we
were losing seven thousand dollars which is why I don't understand why students
aren´t investing in professional help for this if you take control for more
than three times you have not gotten twenty six until full speaking at you need
to sign up or register for a response analysis so we can see what's going on
with you and then based on that we’ll give you a recommendation about whether
private lessons or group lessons or does the self-study course is the best
option for you but stop wasting time stop wasting money, invest in your
education, invest in getting help and you can get those details on our web
pages here on the blog posts if you just listen to this from itunes and you can
access at toeflspeakingteacher.com ok toeflspeakingteacher.com thank you so
much for listening today guys love string this information with you if you have
questions about this please go to our website leave comments on the blog post
page I'm happy to answer any questions and like I said I will probably record
podcasts about each one of these skills as well, definitely about the confidence
aspect of taking the toefl speaking section so thanks again have a great rest
of your day.
