تکلیف چهارم - سخنرانی و مطالعه متن

Task 4 - Lecture & Reading

Speaking task number four is your second integrated speaking task and it is the last reading and listening speaking task. So, you’re going to have a text first. This is a little different than your last text, your last reading in speaking task three, because this is academic. It’s more similar to what you read during the reading section of the test at the very beginning of your TOEFL.

But it’s very short, again, this is one or maybe two short paragraphs so you only have a short time to read, 45 or 50 seconds and just like with speaking task number three, it’s usually 45 seconds. You’re going to have a definition or an introduction to a topic. It could be anything academic, anything you would read in a textbook. Maybe it’s about the changes of the moon, how it shrinks and grows.

Maybe it’s about how we categorize different animals and how we categorize spiders by their bodies. Maybe it’s about mood-changing music, that different music affects the way you think, affects some brain chemicals and changes your mood, changes your emotions. This is again, a general introduction, it’s something that you might see at the beginning of an essay, at the beginning of a chapter, early in some longer text.

If you look at the reading section of the TOEFL, and you take a reading passage, many times, you could use the first paragraph, or the first few sentences from that long reading passage, as a text for speaking task number four. Sometimes that doesn’t work, but sometimes it does, because it’s a very similar set of topics, nature, science, earth it could be really psychology, anything that’s academic, anything you might study in school.

The recording is going to be similar to the lectures that you hear in the listening section. It is a classroom lecture with no students speaking, you will only hear the professor. The professor will explain the importance or the application of the idea which you read about.

While the reading is more general and more of an introduction, the recording gives real world specific examples. These are concrete things that you can picture, things that you can imagine. As I said, they are the details. There are usually two important parts to the listening, to the lecture. Unlike speaking task three, where you will hear two parts of a conversation which are similar to two parts of a reading.

In speaking task four, those two important parts are, only noticeable in the lecture. The reading does not make it so clear. Sometimes the reading shows two details, but it’s pretty rare. So let’s take an example to understand better what I mean about the relationship here. Let’s think about spiders’ bodies and if this is actually the TOEFL, it would be academic.

You would hear the word spider, but that’s not a very scientific word. The professor would use the more scientific word, which this is really about, Arachnids. Now what would you hear about spiders’ bodies? Well, first what would you read about arachnids’ bodies? You might read something that tells you different living things have different categories based on their bodies and we categorize insects, bugs based on their bodies, similar to how we categorize, spiders based on their bodies.

Spiders and insects are very similar, but we can tell the difference by their body shapes and features. Now, we have no real details in that, just an idea. In a, in our listening, in our lecture we would hear more about this idea of arachnids compared to insects. That’s spiders compared to bugs like flies or mosquitoes.

You might hear that spiders have two body sections, a spider- Oops, has only the two sections, and that insects like flies or ants have three sections. You would hear that spiders don’t have antennae, an ant has an antenna, a fly has antenna.

Spiders, have, like, teeth or mouth parts here, but they don’t have antenna and this would be in a longer lecture with more and more detail, but these two specific ways would be the most important parts for you to hear. The timer is very similar to speaking task three. You have 45 seconds to read or possibly 50.

You’ll listen for one to two minutes, the lecture is usually a little bit longer than the conversation in speaking task three. It’s about a minute and a half to two minutes. You’ll read the question and hear it in your headphones, then you’ll have 30 seconds to plan. You already have notes and then you’ll have 60 seconds to speak.

And when you’re done speaking, that’s the end of task number four.