The Speaking Section
The Speaking Section of the TOEFL is made up of 6 questions and takes 20 minutes. Many students find this to be one of the most nerve-wracking sections of the exam because they don't feel confident in their speaking abilities or they feel uncomfortable speaking into the microphone. The good news is that the Speaking Section is one of the easiest to prepare for because the 6 questions follow the same exact pattern in the same order every time.
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Question 1 is an independent question on a familiar topic. It asks you an entirely open-ended question. Voice your opinion and talk about your own experience. Questions here might be about your best friend, a favorite teacher, or a place you would like to visit.
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Question 2 is also an independent question on a familiar topic, but it is actually a little easier than question 1 because you are given choices to pick from. This will help you save time when you are deciding what you are going to say during your preparation time.
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Question 3 is the first of the integrated questions. You will read a short passage about a campus event and then you will hear one or two people discuss their opinion on the topic. You must summarize what the speaker says.
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Question 4 follows the same structure as Question 3, but it is on an academic topic. The short reading passage will look like a paragraph from a college textbook. After reading this, you will hear a professor explain the concept further, often using specific examples. You will be asked to summarize this.
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Question 5 is also an integrated question, but you will not have a reading passage. Instead, you will hear two people having a conversation. One person will have a problem while the other makes several suggestions on how to solve the problem. You must summarize what you've heard and then make your own recommendation.
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Question 6 is typically the question students struggle the most with. You will listen to a professor give a short lecture on an academic topic. The professor usually breaks the topic down into 2 or 3 categories or examples. You will then summarize what the professor said.
Improve Your Pronuncitation-- Free!
In order to help yourself prepare for the speaking section, check out these great resources.
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Rachel's English
This website is great for practicing specific sounds. Rachel, an English teacher, shows students how to position their mouths in order to make the blended sounds that are often difficult for non-native speakers. Rachel guides students through minimal pairs and reductions in order to help students reduce their accent and sound more natural. She has a ton of high quality, free resources, that you can find here.
English Central
This website is great for improving your vocabulary as well as your speaking abilities. The way it works is quite simple. First, you listen to a video. The video is captioned, and you can click on any word in the script in order to get a definition and repeated pronunciation. At the end of the video, hit the "learn" button. The video will automatically remove certain words. You need to type in the missing word that you hear, and the definition will appear again. All of the above is free with a basic registration for all the videos on their website. You can also get a limited amount of speaking practice with the free account. Essentially, you repeat a line and their voice recognition software tells you how accurately you performed. If you want more personalized attention and even more speaking practice, you can upgrade to a Premium or Plantnium account, giving yourself access to more speaking quizzes and even online tutoring. The link to the website is here.
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Talk English
There is a lot of great information on this website. It isn't the most user friendly because everthing is very compartmentalized. However, if you take the time to go thorugh it, there is a lot of great vocabulary and pronunciation advice here: http://www.talkenglish.com
Easy World of English
This website breaks pronunciation down into several helpful categories. You can listen to the pronunciation and repeat the word or pairs of words. The sections on verbs are particularly useful, and the resource is free here.
If you've gone through all of the speaking practice in your book, don't start to stress. Use your friends, your creativity, and a few specific websites to keep producing extra material to practice with.
For independent speaking questions, talk to your friends and family in English whenever possible. Yes, the questions on the actual test are a bit artificial, as is the amount of time you need to speak in order to give a response. But think about what ETS is trying to replicate. They want you to be able to be able to give information about yourself, your background, and your opinions in real time, without pauses. This is exactly what you do when your friend asks you what you want to do tonight. Although he or she might not ask if you prefer to go to the movies or if you'd prefer to participate in a physical activity, like ice skating or hiking, you still need to tell the person what you think and why. This every day practice will make you feel more comfortable. If you have another friend who is studying for the test as well, you can actually do this with time constraints. Meet at a coffee shop and have each person write down 5 new questions and put them on slips of paper. Have the other person draw a slip, respond for 45 seconds, and then together evalute the response. Then repeat the same process so both you and your friend get time to answer and make improvements. A bonus to this set up is that you are thinking like the makers of the test. Remember to make some questions completely open-ended while others should have two clear choices to pick from.
Making new integrated speaking questions is more difficult, but it isn't impossible. In order to practice Speaking Question 3, start reading the students newspaper from your dream school online. This will get you familiar with the types of announcements that would happen on a college campus. Teachers might consider bringing in several copies of a local college newspaper, assign students different articles to read and create transcripts for, and then have the student "present" to the class. To get more speaking practice for Question 6, watch a short clip from Biography.com's Classroom section and answer one of the questions from the listening comprehension section verbally.