Review of Speaking Section of TOEFL Prep Book

I was reading through a popular TOEFL IBT prep book at the library, just to see what kind of advice they were giving.  I was particularly interested in what they had to say for the speaking section.

They gave some standard tips such as preparing answers for the opinion questions before the test and using frames such as "Although others think that ______ because _______, I believe that ________ for several reasons. First, ______"

Then I came across a strategy that surprised me.  The author of the book recommended filling pauses with "uh" and "um" instead of pausing in silence.  Frankly, I disagree.  When you listen to accomplished speakers, they do not use fillers.  When I rated spoken responses, I considered filled pauses worse than silence.

All in all, I thought the speaking section was a bit light.  I will continue reviewing similar books and see which provide material that will help test takers improve the most.

Top 10 Errors to Avoid on Speaking Section of TOEFL

Raters listen to thousands of responses and encounter the same mistakes by non-native English speakers over and over again. The following is a list of 10 common errors that all test takers should try to avoid, especially during test time.

1. Poor Pronunciation (Delivery)
   Delivery of a spoken response is how a speaker 'sounds' especially with regard to pronunciation and fluency. Delivery is what differentiates a spoken response from a written one. Pronunciation can become a problem if the response is not intelligible to a native speaker of English. Another common issue for more advanced speakers is the incorrect pronunciation of a specific word that can be confused for another word in English. For example, a rater might hear 'coma' when the speaker tried to pronounce 'comma,' or a rater might interpret 'road' when the speaker intended 'load'. These errors will certainly be noticed by raters.What you can do: Identify sounds that you have trouble pronouncing that might cause confusion with other words. Some well known examples are /r/ and /l/ for Japanese speakers, /t/ and /th/ for French speakers, and /w/ and /v/ for native speakers of many Indian languages. By becoming aware of the sounds that you find challenging, you will have more insight into which words you should choose (or avoid) in a response. In addition, there are many books and subscription services that can help improve pronunciation. The following are two examples: (Click on the image for more information.)
   
   

   American Accent Training by Ann Cook	American English Pronunciation Patters Professional 4.2 by xCers Corp

2. Poor Fluency (Delivery)
   Examples of poor fluency are large pauses, excessive filler sounds such as "uh" (or phrases such as "you know"), and false starts in which the speaker begins a sentence but then stops to repair or reword what he or she has said. All of these elements can contribute to a response with poor fluency and lower ratings.What you can do: Identify the disfluencies in your own speech. For filler sounds, try to suppress them and pause if you need time to think. Native English speakers who use too many fillers do not sound fluent either. Also, if you tend to repair your sentences after starting them, try slowing down to give yourself more time to plan your sentences. Large pauses are the most difficult to avoid. Practice, practice, and more practice can help words to unfold more automatically as you speak.
   
   
3. Incorrect or Imprecise Word Choice (Language Use)
   Choosing the wrong word is probably the most common error in the subcategory of Language Use. The severity of this error depends on how much the selected word changes the intended meaning of the response. For example, a response that states that a character is "complicated" when the intended word was "confident" will suffer more than a response in which the speaker describes a family as "seeing TV" as opposed to "watching TV." All incorrect word choices will most likely be noticed by raters, though, and will adversely affect ratings assigned to your responses.What you can do: Pay attention to the words and phrases used in the item prompts and reuse them in your own response. This is especially important for item types that ask test takers to describe a character's viewpoint or summarize a professor's lecture.
   
   
4. Changing or Missing Verb Tense (Language Use)
   Another common error in English Language Use is leaving off the tense of a verb, for example, "she decide that ..." Depending on the tense, the speaker should say either "she decides that ..." or "she decided that ..." This type of error can immediately bring down the rating of a response because it shows that the speaker does not have a strong command of English grammar. For more advanced speakers, the problem is not so much the absense of tense as it is inconsistent tense, sometimes changing within the same sentence. For example, "She was sick so they give her medicine." Changing tense can prevent a rater from giving a response the highest score that it might otherwise deserve.What you can do: Choose a popular story that you can tell by heart and record yourself telling the story several times, each time using a different tense. For example, tell the story of the "Three Little Pigs" in past tense. ("The first little pig MADE his house of straw.") Then tell the same story in present tense. ("The first little pig MAKES his house of straw.") Analyze the recordings and detemine whether your response contains inconsistent verb tense.
   

   Practice Makes Perfect: English Verbs by Loretta Gray	Basic American Grammar and Usage: An ESL/EFL Handbook by Marcel Danesi Ph.D.

5. Incorrect or Awkward Phrasing (Language Use)
   The problem of non-native-like phrasing appears in many different forms and therefore can be difficult to identify in your own speech. Some of these errors stem from not understanding word meanings, as in, "The hail was raining," while others are slight errors in word order that completely change the meaning of a response, such as, "He was just not good at it," as opposed to the intended phrase, "He was not just good at it, ..." Any of these types of Language Use errors cause raters to pause and consider the speaker's command of English, which impacts response scores.What you can do: Get feedback from native speakers such as an English teacher or tutor regarding awkward phrases that you use in your speech. Try to understand whether the problem is rooted in word meanings or grammar and practice accordingly.
   
   
6. Wrong Pronouns (Language Use)
   The error of using incorrect pronouns can creep into responses of speakers of all levels. The most common problem is using the pronoun "he" for "she" and vice versa (although inserting "he" for "they," "we" for "he," and a host of other pronoun errors are often encountered as well). What makes matters worse is that some speakers will refer to the same entity as both male and female in the same response. For example, a speaker might say, "Her friends told him that ..." When referring to the same person, try to avoid switching between he/she and him/her at all costs.What you can do: Observe several dialogs in English on television between a man and a woman. Record yourself describing the dialogs. Use pronouns generously. Then analyze your performance using correct pronouns. Repeat this process if this is a challenging area for you.
   
   
7. Misplaced Articles (Language Use)
   Articles are words like "the," "a," and "an" that appear before nouns. Non-native speakers often omit them in their responses and occassionally insert them incorrectly. For example, a speaker might say, "It was tragedy," or "the Jane was ..." This type of error is common for all levels of speakers.What you can do: Practice saying items in lists, for example, "I need to get a lemon, a carton of milk, a loaf of bread, rice, and apples from the store. I plan to get the lemon and the apples from the farmer's market ..." Record yourself and scan your speech for errors. There are also some grammar quizzesyou can take on the web for practice.
   
   
8. Incorrectly Adding "for" (Language Use)
   Non-native English speakers often struggle with the problem of adding "for" in the wrong place, for example, some speakers might say, "They go for hiking" instead of "They go hiking" or "They go for a hike." Generally, the error does not appear in responses of more advanced speakers.What you can do: Practice by describing activities you and others such as your family or friends have done and plan to do during the day. Analyze your responses and continue practicing if "for" errors slip into your responses.
   
   
9. Missing Details (Topic Development)
   Many non-native speakers responses do not convey enough pertinent information. Important details are simply missing. For example, a speaker might explain what a student's opinion is but never provide details about why. This type of error will prevent a rater from assigning the best rating to a response even if other elements such as delivery and grammar are flawless. This probably the most common error in the category of Topic Development.What you can do: Practice using written text. Read a section of text and retell as much of it in English as you can while recording your response. Go back to the text and track how many details you missed. Continue practicing if too many details were left out. If you do fine with summarizing written text consider if you need more practice catching details while listening. If so, continue practicing by retelling stories from recordings of news stories with written transcriptions (for example http://www.literacynet.org/cnnsf/archives.html) or books on tape.
   
   
10. Misinformation (Topic Development)
    The scoring descriptors used by the raters for Topic Development emphasize things such as the relevance of content and its coherence, but an error often observed in non-native English speakers' responses is misinformation. Speakers can blatently get the facts wrong. This type of error can occur not just for struggling speakers but for more advanced speakers as well. A common reason why a test taker might get the facts wrong is negation. In an item, a professor might state that a cause-effect relation could not be determined from the data. Often the word "not" goes unnoticed and the speaker proclaims that the opposite is true. Accuracy of information is critical to receiving a high rating for your responses.What you can do: Use the same strategy as for Missing Details above.
    
    
    

How Do Raters Judge the Speaking Section of the TOEFL?

For the Speaking section of the TOEFL iBT, you will be asked to provide a spoken response to each of six different items. Each of your responses will be recorded and will be saved to a secure database. Then the responses will be played back and analyzed by trained raters who will assign ratings to them. When raters listen to your responses, they will be evaluating your speech along a number of different dimensions. These include Delivery, Language Use, and Topic Development, which are referenced in a specific scoring rubric that raters use while listening to responses. The TOEFL iBT website has a PDF of the official scoring rubric.

Grammatical Errors

Here are a few grammatical errors I found in some essays:

People will spend more time to visit their friends.
Corrected: People will spend more time VISITING their friends.

A plenty of cars are on the streets causing traffic jams.
"A" should not be in front of "plenty." "Too many cars" is actually a better choice considering the context of the sentence.

Word of the day: bureaucracy, "a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation." This definition is from Merriam Webster. Because of all the bureaucracy, I didn't receive my parking permit for months.

What is a collocation and why is it important?

I was helping a non-native English speaker edit an essay and I came across several phrases that sounded foreign to me, for example, "changed our life to the best," and "illnesses that kill people daily." These sound more natural to my ear as, "changed our life for the better," and "fatal illnesses."

Later this week, I read an article in an asian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) journal about 'collocations'. This was a new word for me. Basically, researchers in linguistics gather together a bunch of data - ideally transcribed speech, but usually, written text, and analyze it. There are interesting patterns with regard to how often some words follow other words. When words tend to appear together, this is called 'collocation'. "For the better" is a common phrase for a native speaker, so it makes sense that a close but not exact substitution sounds foreign. The article actually finds a correlation between speaking proficiency of English by EFL learners in Taiwan and knowledge of collocations in English. That said, it is still unclear whether explicitly teaching collocations directly improves speaking and writing. Well, my view is that knowing some common collocations can't hurt. The article is titled, "Lexical collocations and their relation to speaking proficiency of college EFL learners in Taiwan." It's Article 9 or Volume 10 at this link: http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/March_08_jth.php

Here are a few examples of collocations:
carry something too far (He carried the joke too far.)
take care of something (I have to take care of a few things at the office.)
draw her attention to something (Bill drew her attention to the note on the door.)

And now for the word of the post: archive - "a repository or collection especially of information." It can also be a verb, "to archive," or file in such a repository. So if the journal article is not available in the current periodical section of the library, it's probably been archived.

Purpose of TOEFL Blog

Hello TOEFL Test-takers,

Welcome to my TOEFL blog. My goal is to help you score better on the TOEFL. I am a native English speaker with a BA in English and American Literature, a minor in Linguistics, and a Ph.D. in Psychology with an emphasis on spoken language processing. I have experience developing spoken language tests and tutoring non-native English speakers. I hope you find this information useful.

A few days ago, I came across a nice article by ETS. I always wondered if the speaking items of the TOEFL took into consideration speech patterns that actually occur in university settings. According to this article, there was a speech corpus collected at universities for just this purpose. The article actually lists all the words from the corpus - what a fantastic vocabulary list for folks preparing to take the test! The article is called, "Representing language use in the university: Analysis of the TOEFL 2000 spoken and written academic language corpus."

I think for every few blog posts, I'll mention a word from the list to help with vocabulary development. The most frequent words should be easy for anyone taking the TOEFL (words like "about," "all," "everyone"). So, I'll start with the less frequent words that occur mostly in speech. The first word is "aggression." "The boy was minding his own business when the girl suddenly starting scratching and hitting him. I was surprised by the girl's aggression (an unprovoked attack).