Welcome to TOEFL Speaking secrets. So, this is kind of like an open secret, but almost all the teachers I talked to, almost all the students, nobody knows about this, and this is crucial if you want to improve your TOEFL Speaking score. It has to do with how your TOEFL Speaking is actually scored. So, let me get right into it. ETS, the company that makes the TOEFL, has a service called a TOEFL Speaking scoring service. I don't know if you know this, but your TOEFL score is judged by a human rater, but they also have a software called Speech Rater. And this service, this product you can actually buy, and you can do a TOEFL Speaking section and it will be judged by the Speech Rater. Now, here's the exciting part is that you can see the exact grading criteria that's used to judge your speaking, how the Speech Rater actually works. So, everything I'm going to tell you today is from ETS. So, I'm really excited to share this with you because once you know how your speaking is scored, you will be able to know how to practice to improve. So, my name is Josh MacPherson, I'm the head instructor of TST Prep, an online TOEFL school where our mission is simple, to help you get the TOEFL score you need as quickly and easily as possible. And right now let's figure out how to improve your TOEFL Speaking score by looking at the TOEFL Speaking IA Speech Rater from ETS. So, as of filming this January 2020, this is still available on ETS's website. I've put a link in this slide here. It's called TOEFL Practice Online Speaking Series, and it actually says in the description that it's judged by the Speech Rater. So, this is ETS's software that they use to judge some speaking. This is my own kind of score report. There's nothing that said that I couldn't share this. When you take the TOEFL test, you can't share some of the information from the test, but here I read carefully beforehand, so I hope this is okay, this might get taken down, but I hope it's okay because nothing said that I couldn't share this, and you can actually do this yourself. So, just to be clear, let me explain something first, and I'm gonna read what they wrote here in this online speaking feedback. It's judged by the Speech Rater, and I'm reading now. Please note that this report does not address all the abilities scored by human raters in the actual TOEFL test. This information does not necessarily predict your Speaking section score on the actual TOEFL test. So, this measures your delivery. Basically, there are other things that get measured, for example, the content from the reading and listening passages in the integrated speaking, so that's a little different. This is just on your delivery, how you speak. By the way, if you need help to get a TOEFL Speaking score of 26 or higher, in the link in the description below will be a free download to give you templates, rubrics, and different strategies to help you improve your score. You can download that PDF as well. Okay, let me get back to it. Now, the grading criteria. So, I'm gonna go through this quickly first and then I'm going to explain it in more detail later. So, the first two criteria are speaking rate and sustained speech which is fluency, and they look something like this. I'm going to explain this in more detail as we go. The other criteria is pause frequency and repetition. That's how often you pause and how often you repeated certain words. This is what it'll look like when you get feedback to do that speaking scoring. Also, they measure your rhythm and vowels, this is has to do with your pronunciation. And that's what this looks like here. Rhythm is kind of your flow, how you flow when you speak. And pronunciation of vowels is basically for longer words, how you pronounce vowels inside those longer words. And the final grading criteria is vocabulary depth, which is basically what it sounds like, how your vocabulary is. Do you speak with a little bit more depth than other students? So, we're gonna explain this in more detail as we go, but again, I want to be very clear, I do not work for ETS. I am not associated with the TOEFL at all. I'm a TOEFL teacher at TST Prep and basically, we found this product on ETS, and thought that it was so valuable, it has so much useful information for you, who are struggling with the TOEFL Speaking, that we felt it necessary to share it. Okay, so I'm not, I'm not with ETS, just a person who is not a fan, but a teacher of the TOEFL, and I want to help students like you, knowing this grading criteria is really going to help. So, let's look at the actual TOEFL grading criteria according to ETS. They have three sections, three criteria, well, four actually, there's general description, but delivery, language use, and topic development. This Speech Rater basically measures delivery and a little bit of language use with vocabulary. It's not measuring topic development. This grading criteria is just for delivery. So, again this is not a reflection. If you do this, it's not a reflection of your score, it's more of a reflection of how you speak than how well you speak and how you deliver your response compared to other speakers, that's what this is about. Okay, now, again ETS still uses human graders to assess your speaking responses. It's not done by only a robot, there is a human grader. So, the Speech Rater is a software, a computer software that helps analyze your speaking, but your speaking is also graded by a human grader. Again, the product is called TOEFL Practice Online Speaking Series. I left a link, I'll leave a link in the description below so you check it out if you would like. I think if you take, if you took the test before and you didn't get the Speaking score you wanted, I would take this. I think it'll give you a lot of really useful information about your delivery, speaking rate, and your and your sustained speech. So your rate is basically how many words you say in your response. And your speech is how many times you pause. So, for example if your question is, "Do you agree or disagree coworkers make the best friends?", if you speak like this, if you say, "I think um coworkers do make good friends mmm because," that's not gonna be a good response. That's obviously, you probably know that already, but that's what has to do with speaking rate and your speed, like how fast you speak and how fluent you are. So, you want to be kind of smooth when you speak. If you're listening to your response, if you record your speaking and listen, you want to sound pretty smooth. So, that's one thing that you're graded on, well, two of the things that you're graded on. So, if I give this for his example response here, and I say, "To me, I definitely do not think that coworkers make good friends because it's best to keep your work and personal life separate", that's pretty smooth, but if I said, "To me, I definitely do not do not think", and I repeat myself, that's gonna hurt my score, right. And as you can see here, I've put a kind of guide to word count. This is just a rough idea, it's that you have of how many words you should have per response. This is not according to ETS, this is my own experience and our own experience at TST Prep working with students. This is just kind of like an average. The reason why question one is 120 is because it's 45 seconds and the reason why question 2 is more than three and four because question two is a more casual response, it's about
a change on campus, three and four more academic, so they have more academic words. Academic words tend to be a bit longer and harder to pronounce, but this is just a rough idea. If you're about 10 words below, this should be okay, but if you're a lot below, this let's say 15 or 20 words, then you're gonna have to work on speed. That's one thing that you'll have to try to incorporate in your responses and in your practice. Okay, so, and I'll give you some ideas on how to work on speed as well, but let me talk about this next criteria, pause frequency and repetition. This is basically how often you pause, and I'll read this a little bit. Stronger speakers tend to pause less frequently, but keep in mind that other aspects of pausing are also important, for example, pausing at the end of a sentence is better than pausing in the middle of an idea. So basically, it's when you bring words together. If you don't bring words together, then it's gonna hurt your score, so you want to try to bring these things together. And then besides that, another example is repetitions. Repeating the same thing. So, you don't want to pause too much. Native speakers tend to bring words together, especially North Americans, so you want to try to do that in your speech as well. This will be easier for some students than others. To go back to this example, "To me, I definitely do not think that coworkers make good friends," I brought some things together. I didn't say, "To .... me", I said, "to me". I definitely do not think. I don't I didn't say "I definitely...do not... think". I tried to bring things together there. That's another example of this idea of pause frequency and how often you pause. And if you have to repeat the same thing, it'll hurt your score if you do it a little too much. One Pro Tip for you guys is to record your responses. After that, use a voice typing software to transcribe it. Re-record to improve your word count and fluency. So, we're working hard at TST Prep to have a kind of automatic voice checker pretty much, but you can use something like Siri on your iPhone or something like voice typing if you use Google Docs. This is software where you speak and then it says what you wrote or what you said, excuse me. It's called text-to-speech. So you say it, and then it writes it. Now, that's a really great way to check your pronunciation and to see if it's something that is understandable, intelligible. Another thing you can do is transcribe your response, write out your response, type it out, see how many words there are, listen back see where you had some pauses and see if you can bring it together a little bit better. Try to record the same response again. I almost always recommend that students do the same response multiple times, two, three, four, times. Not more than four times. If you do the same response more than four times, you might start going a little crazy, so you don't want to go crazy. You want to be focused and you want to help improve, this is about improving. So, transcribe your responses and do the same one more than once, and it'll help build your confidence. Of course, on the TOEFL you can only speak once to a question, but you're trying to build skills. If you find that something is a problem for you right now, you need to practice it, and that's one way to do that. The next one is rhythm and vowels. So, rhythm again is like the music of the language, but vows is the pronunciation particularly in the middle of longer words. And I'll read this here, it says, "Vowels is a measure of how you pronounce vowels compared with the pronunciation of a native speaker. Specifically, it's a measure of vowel lengths." Okay, so a lot of times, when we say longer words, so for example, in this sentence, "To me, I definitely do not think," I say definitely. Or let me keep going here, "Coworkers don´t make good friends because it's best to keep your work and personal life separate." So, I say separate, a lot of students will say sEparite, sEparite, it or it's sepArite, you know there's a lot of different ways that students will pronounce a vowel that's not exactly the way that we usually pronounce it in American English. A lot of times that we have this sound called the schwa sound, it's just -a sound, separate, separate. So, but a lot of non-native speakers will use other vowel sounds instead. So, they actually have a tool to measure those vowel sounds. Now, I don't think that you have to sound like a native speaker or anything like that, you definitely can have an accent, you know, it's part of you know, learning another language. You're gonna have an accent, but it's just something that they do measure, so keep that in mind. Here are some other popular words that are more than one syllable that might be difficult for you, so you might say something like universaty or a universAty, something like that, but you need university, however, disagrees, disagrees. PAssage, not passAge, not passagee, you know so there's different sounds that might come up with the vowels from people from other language groups. Example, reading, listening, remember. These are just some of the popular words that do come up in the TOEFL that you will probably have to say, that the vowel sounds, you have to be very careful to make sure that they sound like kind of an American accent. The last grading criteria we're going to talk about is vocabulary depth. So basically, this is a measure of your vocabulary range. Stronger speakers tend to use a variety of words. So if you have a kind of simple template and you say things like the first reason is that, the second reason is that, that's why..., you know that's okay, but it might not be a good idea because you're not showing a good vocabulary range. You want to make sure that in your response you show a good range, you could have a template and show range in other areas, but you do want to think about your vocabulary. Now, that doesn't mean that you think of complicated vocabulary words and try to use them. Don't do that. You just want to sound natural and comfortable when you speak and there are a lot of different ways that you can do that. One way that we recommend for the independent question is to be specific. So, what do I mean by be specific? I mean in the independent question, tell a specific story from your past. I'm looking at the third paragraph, it says, "Also you know if you are friends with your colleagues, the relationship often ends when one of you leave the job. For example, at the same job in Korea, when my friend Andrew unexpectedly quit and moved to another school in Seoul, we hardly ever spoke since we were no longer in the same office together." Not really complicated vocabulary, but I'm telling a specific story, so I have things like colleague, unexpectedly, quit, you know I talk about things that are going on in the story, it's not very complicated. I'm not using fancy words, but I'm being specific. Another way that you can get a kind of higher vocabulary score is to use a template that is a little bit, I want to I don't want to say trickier, but not as simple as like "I believe this, the first reason is, the second reason is, that's why." So, if you know about TOEFL Speaking and you know about templates, usually they're pretty common and standard. Here are some examples of different phrases that you can use to start. You can say personally speaking, to be honest, I've never thought about this before but I have to say that, those are just a couple of examples. I'm not going to read all of them, but you can see how these phrases, the phrases that come together are part of that. It's hard to say a phrase confidently because it's three or four words that have to come together. So, by using phrases instead of simple template sentences, it'll help improve your vocabulary. To give you another example, you can also do this with the conclusion. I'll just read the first one. So, that's why, as you can see, to make a long story short, these are different ways to transition to your conclusion. To make a long story short it's a little bit nicer a little bit more vocabulary, a little bit more conversational than just in conclusion, and you just finish right there. Okay, one thing that students often ask is is it okay to be casual for the TOEFL Speaking and the answer is yes and no. You want to sound comfortable and confident, you want to sound natural when you speak, as long as you sound natural, that's the most important thing. And you can see that here with this grading criteria. Pause frequency, repetition, vocabulary depth, all of this stuff is measuring your delivery and how smooth and comfortable you are. So, when you're deciding what to say, ask yourself, "Do I sound comfortable saying this?" Alright, and don't forget you can download the PDF version of these phrases in the link in the description below, How to score 26 + on the TOEFL Speaking. Also, don't forget this is the grading criteria. According to ETS, this is not my words, this is what their SpeechRater graded me on, speaking rate, sustained speech, pause frequency, repetition, rhythm, vowels, and vocabulary depth. Watch this video again, really internalize all of this information and use it to help you improve your speaking performance. This is all about delivery. Remember, I don't work for ETS, this is not a reflection of your score, but it's a big part of it. Okay, you're still judged by a human rater, but they do use the SpeechRater. Also, if you want to do this yourself, this is available on ETS's site. I'll put a link in the description and put it right here as well. It's called the Practice Online Speaking Series where you can get judged by a SpeechRater as well. And also, we have our TOEFL Score Builder program coming out in the near future to help students not just for TOEFL Speaking, but also for all the sections. So, definitely check that out, tstprep.com. Thank you guys for watching. I appreciate you sticking to the end. There's so many other things you could be doing besides studying for the TOEFL, but you actually care about your score, and that's exactly the type of student that we do this for. Thank you guys and I'll see you the next video.
