Adding Stress in TOEFL Integrated Speaking

hello everybody at e2 toefl my name is mark i am your toefl expert here at e2 and today we're going to take a look at one of the most challenging parts of the toefl exam and that is the integrated speaking task so in this video we will briefly review the toefl integrated speaking task what does it require what do you need to do and then we're going to learn more specifically about how to enhance your speaking and speaking score with improved pronunciation to start let's take a look at what you have to do in the toefl integrated speaking task first step you will be given a text and you'll have to read it it'll be on the screen for a very short time and then it will disappear so you will have to take notes make sure that you practice taking notes and that you expect to take notes a lot of students who have gone and taken the test they often come back to me and say yeah i did not realize how much i was going to depend on my notes so i hope you don't have to learn the hard way how important it is to make sure that you're taking notes the second part you'll then hear a lecture that will extend upon the reading so this might either support or extend the ideas shown there or it may actually contradict them so it'll go against what is said there so you'll want to pay attention to what extent does the lecture agree or disagree or support or contradict the reading and that's actually going to help you with your pronunciation i'll show you why very soon finally you'll have 30 seconds to prepare your answer so you look at your notes you think about what you're going to say you might be quickly thinking about some of the things you're going to learn here and then you'll have 60 seconds one full minute to deliver your summary of the reading and the listening while highlighting any ways in which the listening supports the reading or contradicts the reading two very general tips that i would also like to say uh first of all the listening part this is a very common situation i hear with new toefl students they sometimes have difficulty generally listening to the recording listening to the lecture the general advice i give here is build strong listening habits all right so whether that's listening to the radio regularly sources like perhaps bbc radio or abc national radio in australia or potentially podcasts and these should be podcasts that are accessible to you on topics that are familiar and where there's a good enough quality in the editing that you're actually able to follow the content be very careful with podcasts even some people with really good intentions can make podcasts that can be difficult to follow sometimes so don't worry if you find a podcast and then you listen and you're you're thinking this might not be the right one for me um it sometimes takes time but keep looking for something that you can enjoy and that you can benefit from and you'll be on your way secondly in terms of preparation practice taking notes my favorite thing when i teach a toefl class is that on the first day a lot of the students will say teacher i'm just going to listen because it's really hard for me to listen and take notes at the same time in english to which i say that's because you need to practice so when you're listening to the radio when you're preparing take notes the first few times it's going to be difficult but you must train your brain to be able to listen and take notes effectively at the same time in the e2 toefl platform we have lessons on ideas for how to take notes really you want to come up with a system that works for you but with time you will get better at this now today we're not going to look at the reading we're not going to look at the speaking but we are going to look at some notes from a toefl reading and speaking now the main thing with the notes is that you want to be sure that you've listened and you've read and you've made sense of it so if we look here at the notes i've made you can see here i've simply got reading i've got the title and in this case they were talking about actor observer and then i've made a few notes here we focus on situation or external factors when us and then i've highlighted difference we focus on character personality when others so i've got very simple notes here which i'm then going to put into my summary now in my lecture notes i've written down here very specifically extends and supports with an anecdote so i would even say a word like an or with you don't necessarily need but just for today's lesson i want to point out that we talk about prof supports extends that's clear to me because during the actual one minute of delivery i don't want to be thinking about it the more i think the slower i'm going to speak and that's going to affect my pronunciation and sentence stress and that could affect my score then i've got here shopping guy cuts in front he's rude then i've got professor cuts justifies because of situation now again we aren't able to look at the reading and listening today but you can see here i've got my notes and i'm going to show you what my response looks like so today we're going to look at how we can use stress particularly sentence stress to enhance our score in toefl now a very common way that people look at stress is they will say add stress to key words or important words but that can actually be quite difficult you have no idea what those words are going to be and you're not thinking in the test oh an important word is coming up so i'm going to stress it we really want you to develop habits of using sentence stress not for important words but for how important ideas are connected all right that is a bit more predictable and in a few minutes you'll understand how this works now if we take a look here at my screen i've written out a potential toefl integrated speaking task response and you'll see here there's some language that you might be able to use in your upcoming toefl exam but also we're going to talk about how to deliver the words more effectively now the first thing that most toefl teachers will say is add stress to keywords now as i said that's difficult how do i know what the keywords are i will say this the main topic is almost always going to be a key word so if we look at my sample here i've underlined the key idea here the text describes the actor observer relationship now a lot of students when they're first starting this i'll often hear something like this the text describes the actor observer relationship grammar's great pronunciation is a bit flat so we want to add a little bit of stress and pause the text describes the actor observer relationship perfect you've added stress and you've done it very quickly that's the first thing and the one thing that i would say everybody wants to think about add stress to that main focus of the reading and the listening now let's add beyond that because we don't want to start with that first sentence with beautiful sentence stress and then continue with which is a phenomenon that describes how we look at the you can see it's it's quite flat so how do we think about sentence stress in our toefl speaking task one thing you can look at first is contrast words that show opposite ideas or they show this relationship that has one side or another in toefl so if you look at my answer now all of these red words are compared with another idea later in the text let me show you an example with the first sentence again now i might say something like this the text describes the actor observer relationship i then finish that part of the speaking task and i go on to the next part in the lecture the professor expands on this by describing his own so you can see there in the text in the lecture so i'm using my sentence stress to show that i've got two different ideas now i know what you're thinking that's a lot of stress if you don't get the first one if you don't get you know the text describes the actor observer relationship but then later you say the lecture then talks about that's more than enough you don't have to stress every single contrasting word but practice it try try stressing a few of these words when you're practicing and you know you could be practicing in your toefl class you could be practicing a little bit on the train on the way to work or on the bus thinking about how you might use stress and don't worry it's not just your toefl exam you're gonna need this in university you might need this at your job if you're delivering presentations in english as well so you know you might be thinking okay you know i'm taking the test and when it's when it's over i can forget all this but actually the more important use of your presentation skills and your pronunciation is probably going to be after the toefl test so just remember that if we continue looking at some of these other red words you can see that i've continued to highlight contrasts let's continue looking at my text the text describes the actor observer relationship which is a phenomenon that describes how we look at the behavior of ourselves and others through a different lens so again ourselves and others through a different lens i have my sentence stress i stress those words and then my intonation comes down so think about this which is better which is a phenomenon that describes how we look at the behavior of ourselves and others or which is a phenomenon that describes how we look at the behavior of ourselves and others through a different lens so just by adding a bit of stress there i've made a bit of a difference in the pronunciation there are a few more we often look at our behavior based on situations while we judge others behavior based on their personality or character again stress stress you can continue to see more in the second part he immediately became annoyed and judged the man to be rude and then later on and this time he was in a hurry in this situation he didn't consider himself rude or selfish so again i'm comparing he became annoyed and judged the man in one situation but then in the compared situation he didn't consider himself rude so i've added the stress there now again you don't have to hit all of these red words but if you get the ones at the end in this situation he didn't consider himself rude perfect you're being very clear with the relationship between the ideas within the text and that's what's really important not just that you're giving correct information and that you're giving correct grammar but that you're saying it in a way that is highlighting the relationship there's more so we don't just have to look at contrasts we can also look at lists this is another common way that we use sentence stress to highlight ideas now there's two ways you can do it you can do it with a list or you can do it with the connector of a list so you'll see here the first one we have look at the behavior of ourselves and others through a different lens you could do both the behavior of ourselves and others through a different lens or the behavior of ourselves and others through a different lens they both work practice whatever makes you happy as we move on to the end of that paragraph the end of the first section of our answer you'd say here we judge others behavior based on their personality or character or based on their personality or character both of those would work and you can see in the second part of my answer it happens again he judged the man to be rude selfish and inconsiderate or rude selfish and inconsiderate so again i'm using that stress i have nice flow and my intonation goes down moving on we've got sequencing these are very common predictable words that are going to come up in many parts of the speaking test but let's take a look at these in the second part we're talking about the lecture and we describe the professor telling the information he starts with a story about a visit to the grocery store when someone cut in front of him then he describes how a few days later he was at the store again and this time he was in a hurry so again we can use these different words that show sequence and add a bit of stress to those to highlight first this happened and then this happened remember if you don't use sentence stress it's not wrong but you're missing the potential of a higher score because your pronunciation has highlighted the connection of ideas finally emphasis words this is the easiest one i think um just words like more most never didn't these very basic words that will come up in almost every uh toefl speaking task that you can do and you can see this one's quite simple if we look towards the end of the spoken response he was cutting off a woman who was also heading to that line and who had a lot of things to buy in this situation he didn't consider himself rude or he didn't consider himself rude or selfish based on the situation he thought he had done nothing wrong again all of these are possibilities now if you're looking at that answer you're seeing a lot of color and no you absolutely do not have to have all of these in fact it might sound a little bit strange if you have all of them so just practice it a little bit and get a few and that alone would be enough to help bring up your score all right everyone so i'll read through this task i'll read through this answer and i'm going to add some sentence stress and to be honest i'm going to do it kind of randomly so i'm not thinking too much about it i will say there's some like text and lecture if i don't get them both i will probably at least get lecture i think that one's a very predictable one that you might need in the test so you might as well practice it so here we go the text describes the actor observer relationship which is a phenomenon that describes how we look at the behavior of ourselves and others through a different lens we often look at our behavior based on situations while we judge others behavior based on their personality or character in the lecture the professor expands on this by describing his own personal experience he starts with a story about a visit to the grocery store when someone cut in front of him he immediately became annoyed and judged the man to be rude selfish and inconsiderate then he describes how a few days later he was at the store again and this time he was in a hurry he saw a short checkout line and he ran for it cutting off a woman who was also heading to that line and who had a lot of things to buy in this situation he didn't consider himself rude or selfish based on the situation he thought he had done nothing wrong so again that stress adds a bit of emphasis i'm not doing all of it and i'm still managing to keep a relatively smooth and faster paced not too fast but i'm not slowing down too much with excessive sentence stress it takes time do make sure that you practice so that's all i really want you to think about in this uh it's a really good way to practice your speaking and and by the way this is something you're going to use later in life as well uh if you're going to university or if you're working at a company and you need to give a presentation this is what you're going to be practicing you're going to be doing this exact kind of practice so don't don't just think this is for the toefl test this is going to help you in other aspects of your academic or professional life as well so remember don't just look for keywords maybe find one or two keywords probably the focus of the task second think about words that show connection words that are showing how ideas are connected just like the ones we saw there remember you don't have to get all of them in fact you really shouldn't try to get all of them just getting a few is going to be enough to possibly bring up that score and of course practice and get feedback here at e2 we have tasks available for our students to practice with and then submit for feedback so that's it everybody sentence stress is one simple way that you can start working on your toefl integrated speaking task my name is mark from here at e2 thank you very much and good luck [Music] you

Channel: E2 TOEFL

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Keywords: TOEFL, toefl, toefl ibt, TOEFL ibt, E2 TOEFL, TOEFL E2, E2 Language, E2, TOEFL Writing, toefl writing, TOEFL writing, TOEFL Reading, toefl reading, toefl Reading, TOEFL Speaking, TOEFL speaking, toefl speaking, TOEFL Listening, TOEFL listening, toefl listening, toefl tutorial, toefl tips, 30/30, TOEFL TIPS, toefl science, Toefl, toefl speech, speech, integrated, integrated speaking, TOEFL Integrated, TOEFL integrated speaking, sentence stress, word stress, toefl integrated

Id: 7B7ulnX3A0U

Length: 19min 38sec (1178 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021