مهارت مکالمه

Speaking Section

In this lesson, we’ll look at what is on the TOEFL Speaking Section. So, you’re going to have a few different types of speaking tasks. What do you have to talk about? The first couple of questions in this section are independent, meaning they don’t include any reading or listening. You talk about your own experiences and your opinions, things from your own head.

You won’t summarize anything. Just give your thoughts. The next questions are integrated. That is, you will listen and read, or just listen and then summarize what you heard or read. Two of those will be about lectures.

You’ll listen to a professor talk to a class, and then you’ll summarize what the professor said, using your own words. The other two will be about student life. There’ll be conversations again. And you’ll summarize what you heard about those student’s lives and their problems or their discussions with their friends or professors.

We’ll look at this in more detail later in this lesson. For now, let’s move on to talk about the clock. As always, the speaking section is timed, just like the other sections. All of the TOEFL is, of course, timed. Now, the speaking section is interesting because the clock is very short, you don’t really have much time.

The independent tasks, the first two, each give you 45 seconds to speak. And before you speak, the test only gives you 15 seconds to prepare. That might seem kind of crazy. 15 seconds. What can you do in 15 seconds? It’s barely enough time to pick up your pencil, write down a word, one word, and put your pencil back down.

It’s very, very short. But don’t panic. Don’t be scared by this. You only have 45 seconds to speak because that’s all you need. You don’t need more time. You don’t need to say a whole essay.

You just need to give a few sentences. They don’t need very much from you. They only want 45 seconds worth of talking. The next tasks are integrated tasks, and they’re a little bit longer. These are the ones that ask you to summarize a lecture or summarize a conversation, and maybe summarize a lecture and a reading, or a conversation and a reading.

You get 60 seconds to speak on all four integrated tasks. And for two of them, you get 20 seconds to prepare. And the other two, you get 30 seconds to prepare. So you have a little bit more time here. Because you have such short time for all of these tasks, you need to use that time very carefully.

Don’t spend too much time talking about one topic if you need to mention three other topics also. You need to go quickly and carefully through everything that you want to say. And, yes, this does cause some stress. The best way to deal with stress is to practice speaking with a clock. Do it often.

Use a timer on your phone, or computer, or watch, or whatever. And speak about a topic for exactly 45 seconds, or 60 seconds, one minute. Do that again, and again, and again. When you’re on a train, when you’re on a bus, and you don’t want to talk by yourself because maybe other people will think you’re crazy, do it in your head. Take out your phone, time yourself and speak for 60 seconds in your head about some specific topic.

Do it when you’re cooking, do it when you’re walking, do it when you’re driving. Well, okay, maybe not when you’re driving. Don’t crash your car. But when you’re cooking, fine. When you’re walking, fine. Any time is the point.

The best way to manage this time is to structure your speaking. Now, you don’t have a lot of time to plan and structure what you want to say. Might seem like it’s a little bit difficult if you only have 15 or 20 seconds. But you do have enough to create a very quick, very general, very simple structure that you’ll follow when you speak.

The basic structure is something like this. Now, this can really change depending on the speaking task. Question one is very different from question number four. But we’ll look at the specific structures for each question in later lessons. For now, just understand this very general structure of the big idea, and then detail one, detail two, etc.

This is what your notes will look like in that 15 seconds before you speak, or 30 seconds before you speak. What’s the main idea, what’s the first detail, second detail, etc. You’ll want to use that structure to manage your time. Say for example, you can spend about 15 seconds speaking about the main idea. Then you can spend 15 seconds speaking about detail one.

Then you can spend 15 seconds speaking about detail two, etc. That way, you can organize your thoughts, and you can finish on time. Say everything you want to say. Now, this 15 seconds for each is not exact, of course, and it does change between different topics, different speaking questions. The important idea is that you will match with the clock at least in a rough way.

So it might be ten seconds for the main idea. Or it might actually be five seconds for the main idea. But you want to know exactly when it’s time to move from the main idea, and start the next part, and then move from the next detail onto detail number two, etc, etc. Now, let’s go back and review the individual speaking tasks one by one.

The first two questions are independent. They’re just about your opinion. You make a choice and you explain it, you give reasons. Question one asks you to choose from many. For example, you might have a question that asks you who is an important person in your family?

And maybe you have 10 people in your family, that’s a very big family, it’s bigger then my family, at least. But you’re just going to choose one person and talk about that one person. Question two, on the other hand, asks you to make a choice from two things, cats or dogs, black or white, up or down. You select one of them and give reasons why you chose that one.

These two, questions one and two are very similar. This is a very small difference. They’re both about your ideas, your opinions. Tasks three and four on the other hand are integrated. They’re about reading and listening, and then you speak. So, one of these will be about a conversation, and one of them will be about a lecture.

They’re very different tasks. They’re not very similar, like questions one and two are. But, the structure of reading and listening is the same between them. You’ll have about one minute to read, and about two minutes more or less for the listening. These are shorter, especially the reading is very, very short than what you see on the reading section of the TOEFL, or the listening section of the TOEFL.

Still, the big part of the task is speaking, summarizing. After each of those, as I said, you’re asked to summarize. What are you asked to summarize, though? You have to summarize the listening, especially. The reading gives you extra detail, but both questions ask about the listening, and there’s even more of that.

The next two questions, questions five and six, are integrated with listening only. There is no reading. Again, you get one conversation between students and one lecture, a professor talking. And after that, you will just summarize what you heard. Now, there is one interesting topic here, one interesting question.

Question number five is the conversation here, and you will give your opinion on that conversation. This is the only integrated task on the TOEFL that asks you to summarize and give your opinion. That makes it a bit difficult especially for timing. It’s important to remember that no other integrated task asks for your opinion.

It’s only this one. Usually, you just have to summarize on all the speaking tasks and the writing task. But in this case, question five, you summarize and give your opinion. Okay. And that’s all for what you’ll see on the TOEFL speaking section. Thank you for watching.