Speaking section is the third part of the TOEFL exam which takes place after a 10 minutes break after the listening test. The speaking section in TOEFL exam is 17-20 minutes long in which a student is given 4 tasks. Wherein, one of the tasks is an independent task where the student is required to draw opinion on a familiar subject and the remaining three are integrated tasks where the student is required to read, then listen and is then required to comment according to the situation. For each task, a student gets a preparation time of 15-30 seconds and is supposed to speak for 45-60 seconds.
The Speaking Section in the TOEFL exam is considered to be one of the most scoring sections in the exam. So, here are a few tips that will surely help the aspirants to get through this section easily:-
Take pauses instead of uttering ‘umm’: Uttering blank noises like ‘umm’ or ‘uhh’ may leave a negative impact on the examiner. Instead, a student is suggested to take a second pause wherever he/she feels stuck. The examiners tend to be totally fine with such silences majority of the times.
Accents do not matter, correct English does: Trying a different accent instead of using the student’s native one may result in him/her messing up pronunciations of some words. The student is recommended to stick to their native accent and try to stress out on each sentence and word differently through fall and rise in the voice, which requires some practice.
Do not panic if you get cut-off in the middle: TOEFL gives you a very short space of time (less than a minute) for the content that a person speaks on for at least 3-4 minutes. It is completely normal for a student to get cut-off in the middle. The examiners do not deduct marks in such cases. Thus, there is no need to create a panicky situation else one will end up ruining the next speech too.
Speak only what you remember: A student should not try to remember everything and not try to bring up what he/she doesn’t remember in the middle of the speech. Remembering everything is not recommended, it leads to muddling up of different elements of the audio in the head. And trying to talk about what one doesn’t remember will ultimately leave one stuck in the middle of the speech and may result in a significant deduction in the score.
We hope you have got an idea of how attempt and ace the speaking section of the TOEFL exam. Check out our other such blogs.
Good luck!
