In TOEFL Speaking Task 1, you want to talk about an important personal issue. And in TOEFL Speaking Task 2, you need to give and support an opinion and decision an important social problems.

In a real conversation, the answers to these kinds of questions could be pretty difficult. But on the TOEFL, you only have fifteen seconds to think of your answer, and just 45 seconds to actually talk. This really isn’t much time! So for each answer, quickly think up your basic response, and not more than four supporting details and informations. In fact, you may be able to fill the 45 seconds with just one actually solid supporting detail for your response.

For TOEFL Speaking tasks 3 and 4, focus on the lecture and not the reading

TOEFL Speaking Task 3 and TOEFL Speaking Task 4 needs you to read a paragraph, listen to speakers talk about the paragraph, and summarize what the speakers said. But often, test - takers forget that they are summarizing the speech and not the reading. Don’t make this mistake. You should just skim the reading. If you try to read the paragraph very carefully and consciously for all last details and informations, you may not finish the paragraph quickly enough. You could also be distracted from the real focus of these tasks: the audio track. It’s perfectly fine to just skim the paragraph and treat it as background information for the more vital audio.

Use different listening and note-taking strategies for lectures and conversations

The lectures in TOEFL Integrated Speaking have a structure that’s not too different from an academic reading paragraph. When you take notes on lectures, the idea is to understand the key academic information in the talk, identifying main ideas and supporting informations and data. In other words, you can think of yourself as “reading” a lecture in TOEFL Listening.

The conversations in TOEFL integrated speaking are different. In Task 3, only one speaker really matters — the speaker who has an opinion about the ideas and opinion in the reading. There for, you should take the notes that show a “back and forth” between the ideas in the reading and the speaker’s response to those ideas. But in Task 6, both speakers matter equally. In that case, you need to pay close attention to what each speaker says, so you can identify the problem that’s being discussed and the proposed solutions to the problem.

Understand how English intonation works

In English language speech, important words are emphasized by a rising and falling tone. Being able to hear and recognize this pattern or method will help you identify all of the important information in the TOEFL integrated speaking audio. You should also require to reproduce this intonation method in your own spoken responses. Even if your pronunciation is great, super your speech can be pretty hard to understand if you don’t use standard English intonation. (For help in this area, check out these tutorials for English intonation and its “rise and fall” tones.)

Be aware of your pronunciation strengths and weaknesses

There are probably some words in english that you have a lot of mistakes pronouncing. And this is actually OK! TOEFL speaking doesn’t needs you to get rid of your accent or be perfect at pronunciation. But you do need to use good pronunciation strategies. In your spoken responses, avoid words you have trouble pronouncing, if possible. And if you must say a word that is hard for you, find ways to repeat the word in your response. That way, the listener has multiple chances to hear and understand the word and you are able to put many more context around the word, giving more clues and ideas about what you’re trying to say.