 Yeah, we's on the internet. Hello, my people. How are you today? Hope you're doing well. My name is Meacham and we are gonna be hanging out here for a little bit of TOEFL practice, my people. Oh wait, that's gonna be DMCA. Hang on, there we go. There's my chill hop. I just had to get my music set up there. There we go. One of these days, I'm gonna come in here and have the perfect audio, everything ready to go. But until that day happens, we're just gonna have to work it out one day at a time. So let's talk about what we're gonna be doing today. We're gonna be doing TOEFL speaking. This goes out to you, Joe, and anybody who's taking the TOEFL. So I have been wanting to do this for a while, but I'll be honest, it's been kinda complicated because here's the thing, right? The TOEFL speaking test relies heavily on content created by ETS, which is the company that does the TOEFL. So I can't just play the audios that you need to respond to, right? Because that would be copyright audio and that would get me in trouble here. And similarly, I can't just pull up their mock exams even though we paid for them because, again, unlicensed use of material. I learned this the hard way with our SAT program videos. I made five reading videos about the SAT and about how you could use the SAT to practice your reading and stuff. And I was giving people sort of classes on this platform about the SAT and the readings and doing each type of reading, a scientific, a historical, and a fictional literature and all that stuff. So as I was doing those, I was thinking, okay, we got this under control, we're cool, and people seem to like them, it was going well. And then College Board went and submitted a takedown request and knocked all my videos out, literally, knocked them all out. So they said, oh, you know, it's copyright material, blah, blah, blah. So basically I'm trying not to get in trouble today. That's kind of the goal. So hopefully, hopefully we don't have that problem. I believe I have come up with a clever way to work around this issue, as you will see. So let's talk a little bit about this TOEFL speaking test, what it involves, what you can expect when you take the test, all right? So first of all, let's start with this right here, just a little overview of what you're gonna see on this test. The TOEFL used to have six parts, but today it is now just four parts on speaking. So they used to have two independent tasks and then four integrated tasks. Well, now it's one and three. So that's one difference that has, I think they changed that last year or the year before. So that makes it a little bit shorter, a little bit easier. So let's talk about what those tasks are. So the independent task is basically the same as an essay prompt, like the text that they give you is almost identical to what they would give you for writing part two. That's a type of question where you're gonna get sort of an either or situation. Do you believe this or this? And you're gonna have to explain your opinion, use some examples, and there you go. That's basically all you gotta do. So that would be kind of the way that that goes. That's the easy one. You only have to talk for 45 seconds on that one. So it's a little faster. Then we've got the integrated ones. These are the ones that everybody hates. These have 60 seconds speaking time. So you are expected to talk a little more. And two of these will include a reading and listening task and one will just include a listening task. So again, these are integrated because they're integrating different skills. You're gonna read, listen, talk, right? Read, listen, talk, or just listen to a lecture and talk, okay? Those are the different parts that you're gonna see on the test. Now, there is something extremely important that I need to give you people. I need to explain, okay? It's all about note taking. Give me one sec, I'm gonna show you what I mean. Right here, this guy right here. This is gonna be super important. Let me just see if I can, oh, see, it's funny. My graphics card thinks I shouldn't show this to you there. Now I can see that you can see it. Whiteboard, you're gonna want one of these. If you are taking the TOEFL at home, which is something a lot of people are doing these days, you will need somewhere to take notes and it cannot be something permanent, okay? Cannot be a piece of paper. Cannot be like permanent markers. It needs to be something you can actually erase between sections of the test. There will be a person that will ask to see that you have erased your notes after you're done with a section of the test. So listening, speaking, what have you. So it's very important that you have this with you. If you go to the TOEFL Center, you will want to maybe ask them what their policies are because different centers can have different policies as for how you can take notes. But this is the thing, you need to be using some kind of note-taking tools. I cannot stress this enough. If you do not take notes on this test, you are going to get a bad grade. It's that simple. If you're not the type of person who usually takes notes, start practicing. Start getting into that mindset. I'm gonna take some here and you know, it's gonna be kind of hard for me to show you exactly what they are, but I'll try. I'll see if I can give you a little peek into my notes today so you can see what I'm doing with those. The main idea with note-taking is just so that we can keep track of what's going on in the audios because you are going to have to sort of re-explain or discuss what you just heard in those audios. So you gotta keep all that information and it's not gonna fit in your brain. Your short-term memory is not gonna be good enough for this, so you're gonna have to, you know, take some notes, keep a record of what you heard so that you can develop your own speech. And also, this will be helpful for planning your speaking because they do allow you a little bit of time to think about what you wanna say. And in that time, you may also write some ideas so that you can keep yourself organized and you can refer to this stuff while you talk. So not only are the notes gonna help you understand the content better and hopefully reproduce it better, but they're also gonna give you some tools that can help you organize your speaking. So we definitely want to take notes. There's one thing that I can tell you is that my people. And if you got any questions about the test, holler at the chat or say hello. It's always nice to hear from chat, you know? Gotta pop to open here, so say what's up. Now, the planning time on that note about like what we should be doing here is I wanna try to write down some key words that I'm gonna use in my speech or my little discourse. And that comes into play a lot when we get into some of the later ones, but even in the very first task, the very first independent task, I think that's an important thing to do, just to organize yourself. And so the last thing you want on this test is to be stuck trying to figure out what you want to say next. If you start talking and then you freeze in the middle and you just wasted five or six seconds, it's gonna bring your grades down. I'm gonna show you guys the rubrics later too so you can see what I mean. The speaking part really depends on fluency and that means you gotta keep it moving. You wanna always be talking. You only have up to a minute, so you can't afford to have a lot of dead space in that minute. There's not a lot of tolerance for you sitting there thinking about what you wanna say. That brings your grade down. And so it's really important to organize and use that planning time to just quickly get your ideas in order. And I'm gonna show you how I would do that as well, okay? So we're gonna start out with an independent task because that's what the test starts out with. I'm gonna give you an example. This one, we don't actually need any audio or anything for it, because it's just a text prompt and I took a screenshot and it should be fine. So I'm gonna also pull up my timer, which I should point out that you probably won't be seeing this all the time because I'm doing this like PowerPoint presentation. This thing won't stay on top. And so I'm just gonna kinda move it over here for now but you can always see, of course, there's a timestamp in the video. I'm gonna adhere to the time but it probably won't be on the screen here all the time because it's gonna be a mess, alt-tabbing back and forth. So for this task, I would have 15 seconds to prepare and 45 seconds to speak. And I'm gonna just show you real quickly what I'm gonna do here. So my plan is very simple. I wanna state my opinion. What do I think based on the question they give me? And then I wanna give two reasons. Now, the reason I say two reasons is that I don't think you have enough time to really develop three ideas. Idea development is also an important thing to understand in TOEFL. Like we don't want to try to just say 15 different ideas and not develop any of them. Conversely, I think one won't fill the time enough. So I feel like two is a really good number for the independent task. Two reasons that I can develop. And by develop, I mean I need to explain why I believe those reasons. I need to maybe give an example of those reasons so that it's really clear that this is what I think and this is why. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna have our opinion, two reasons and develop each reason with a little more. You know, a little bit of a logic, little bit of an argument, maybe an example if we have time for it, okay? So that is the strat. So I'm gonna, it's gonna pop up here in a second and if you're at home and you wanna follow along and try this as well, feel free to like pause me and give it your best shot or wait till I'm done, whatever you want. But this is a tool for you as well. This is a practice test, so feel free to use it. I'll be time stamping this as well in the future. So we'll make sure we're nice and organized, you know? I'm actually gonna try to be smart today and like take notes on that right now so that I know what time this, yeah, we're like almost right around 10 minutes in. So perfect. There we go. I'm being smart today. It's a rarity. I don't do that all that often. All right, let's do this thing. So, timer's ready to go. Here we go. Some people think that family members are the most important influence on young adults. Others believe that friends are the most important influence. Which do you agree with? Explain why. Okay, I'm studying my timer for 15 seconds of prep. Okay, that was 15 seconds and now I gotta start talking. All right, 45 seconds on the clock. Here we go. I believe that family members are the most important influence on young people. I think there's two very clear reasons why. Number one is the amount of time that they spend together and two would be the proximity or the closeness between family members and the person being influenced. Where regarding time, your family spends more time with you than anybody else. Like they've been with you from your birth and they will be around you every day of your life. And so that means they can have a much greater influence on you than anyone else. And when it comes to proximity, they are closer to you, right? You trust your family inherently. They are your blood. They are your relatives. They're supposed to have your best interests. So you never know for sure if other people are always acting in your best interest, but you do know that your family is. All right, that was 45 on the dot. That was solid. Yeah, I have my do not disturb on so it didn't beep on me, unfortunately for you guys. I would like it to beep for you, but yeah, that was 45 seconds. Now, just looking at, let's see, let's see real quick if we can just. I think I might have muted my Nvidia output here. Sorry about that. Just explaining my thing here. I might just erased it. So that might have been an oops, my bad. Anyway, what I was saying is just like, the idea here is to develop these reasons in that time that I have. So my reasons were time and proximity. I decided to just focus on those two. I gave them each about 15 seconds of time. That plus my intro was good enough. You don't really need a conclusion here. You don't have enough time for that. So don't worry about it. All right, let's get back to, yeah, we're good, right? Yeah, we're good. Okay, so what we're gonna do now is move into the more complex ones, the integrated tasks, okay? So when I get an integrated task that has a reading, there's some things we gotta do. First, understand what the reading is for. The readings are there to establish the context or define key terms. Like, if I get, there's generally two types we have to worry about. So there's item number two, the second speaking task, will be a conversation between two university students, generally, and in that conversation, they're reacting to some news, something that has happened. And that's what the text is about. The text is giving me the context of their conversation. It's gonna let me know what they're talking about and why. And then when I listen, I'll be able to, you know, focus on the points from that text and see how they were responded to in the audio. And that's what they're gonna ask me to explain. So it all comes together. It's very important that you look at that text and understand what it's for. Like, what are they trying to help me understand? And we'll see more specifically how to use them in each type of item. Item three is a lecture, but you get a reading before the lecture. Now, the reading in that case is generally going to be a term, like a key term or concept that the teacher is trying to explain. So you're getting a sort of definition of that term in the reading. And then in the lecture, the professor is going to give you some more explanation of it. He's gonna give you some examples or explain how he's experienced this thing. So in both cases, the reading is really important to helping us understand the audio. But remember this, you are not being asked to talk about the reading. You're being asked to talk about the audio. So you should not reference the text in the, like when you're recording, don't waste your time with that. The text is there to set you up for the audio, which is going to determine your response. So just keep that in mind. The reading itself is not that important for your audio, for your speaking. The part that's important is the audio you listen to. So the last thing I wanna point out is with these ones that have a reading, you get 30 seconds of prep time, and you also have a separate reading time. So they will indicate how much reading time you get, and then you will have this prep time after you hear the audio. So that's what we're gonna demonstrate in just a second here, okay? Sorry, I've been a little coffee today. I had a little pate this weekend. I did a number on my lungs. So, all right. So in this next slide, what I'm gonna show you guys is the reading. I'm gonna take the time for the reading, and then I may also take some notes on this reading. We'll see. Just to think about key ideas or key phrases that might be really important. All right, 45 seconds on the clock. Go. Okay, I got about 10 seconds left, but I am gonna actually give you a little feedback on what I'm working on right now with my notes here and kind of what I'm thinking. So there are basically two key benefits that they mentioned here. They talk about developing leadership and organizational skills that you wouldn't learn in a classroom. And then they also established that you would form relationships with a company, right? So those are the main points in the reading, and I'm going to expect that this audio is going to refute those points. Almost always that's what happens here. Like in almost every case, the audio is gonna reject the text. There are exceptions to this. Sometimes it supports the text, but in most cases it's gonna reject it. But what I'm trying to do here is just identify very quickly what are those main ideas? And so when I see that it's like, okay, there's this one semester of work experience with these two proposed benefits, right? Or two reasons. And I wanna listen for those. So to listen for those, we're gonna just tone down our audio here for a second because we have the audio right here in a rather bizarre fashion, so enjoy. I'm gonna, I'll actually turn this up a little bit for you guys, turn on my desktop audio so you guys can hear this better. Did you read this announcement? Yeah, and I disagree. I don't think it will actually help students. Really? Why not? Well, they talked about leadership and organizational skills, but that's not really the kind of work you do. Like my older brothers had the kind of jobs they're talking about, and typically you're just there to do basic tasks like typing or filing stuff, nothing very meaningful. Oh, so you wouldn't actually learn anything new? Exactly. I guess I see what you mean, but what about the other point they make? About this helping us after we graduate. I don't agree. How come? Well, the problem is that there are lots of other universities in our area that have the same requirement. So there are lots of other students at these positions. Yeah, I guess I hadn't thought of that. So even if you take a position like this in a company while you're still a student, once you graduate, the competition for permanent jobs will be impossible. I mean, there just won't be enough jobs available for all the business graduates in this city who will be looking for full-time work. I see what you're saying. The woman expresses her opinion of the university's new policy. State her opinion and explain the reasons she gives for holding that opinion. All right, there we go. So Microsoft read the audio. So I don't think that's copy right now. All right, so again, I'm gonna start doing my speaking in a second here, but I'm trying to walk you through this first one a little bit. I wanna take a moment to go back to my notes. So here's what we've got. Let me see if I can show you this a little bit if I get up in here, maybe if it sees me, no? Yeah, whatever. Anyway, or we could just go camera too. Hang on, I'm still finishing my audio here. I'm sorry I'm not as organized as I should be today. Yeah, that should be better. That should be working now. Okay, there we go. So let's go back to this, yeah. I'm sorry, I did a bunch of configurations and forgot to set up my scenes. So yeah, I started with this stuff up here which is just my like, what I saw in the reading that I wanted to listen for. And then as soon as I got into the audio, she actually used these same phrases. She said leadership and organizational skills, word for word. So I was able to really quickly identify what she said about that over here. And then I've got my notes on that and what she said about the relationship part that they made, you know, the idea about you getting a job more easily. So let's go back. So I'm gonna prepare my speaking now. Now that I've got this already done here, I'm gonna just jump into it because I kind of know what I'm gonna do here. All right, and I'm gonna use my board to help me out. And so you'll see right now, speaking 60 seconds now, I'm gonna change my timer to go. Okay, so the woman in the audio was reacting to some news from her state university that said every student would have to do one semester of work experience with a local business. And she does not agree with the benefits that they claim this will have. She thinks, first of all, that it's not going to teach you anything new. They think it will be beneficial for like learning leadership and organizational skills, but she says that her brothers have worked in these situations and typically you're getting a very low entry level job that is not going to teach you advanced leadership skills or organizational skills. You're gonna be doing very basic tasks that anybody could do. The other thing the university claims is that you will have an easier time finding a job after you graduate. And she also says that's not true because most of the universities are also doing this. And so if everybody's doing it, that means there's a lot of students that are gonna have the same connections. It's gonna have a lot of competition and there just won't be enough jobs for everybody. Boom, right there, just finished, just finished, I'd love to see it. Okay, so I'm trying to make sure that I include a, I'm not talking about the reading, but I am establishing the context of this conversation and explaining what she is refuting and giving her reasons for why. So I mentioned like her older brothers were an example. I mentioned that, you know, she said there would be not enough jobs and so I've covered those points. I think we're looking pretty good on that. So we're gonna get to the next one now. All right, so the next slide here is the one where we're gonna have a lecture and I'm gonna have this key concept that they're gonna explain with the reading. So we'll start there. Okay, 50 seconds, the establishing shot. I'm gonna wipe off my board real quick. I'm not looking at it. I'm trying to be as honest as possible. All right, I know this is far from official, but you know, I'm doing the best I can. It's been a busy day. All right, time run. Okay, I think I've read through this and I have it all pretty clear. I'm gonna go straight through and just do this one and then we'll talk about it after. So let's go and hear the audio. So, the other day I went to this great new movie and one of the scenes in particular, I thought, was really set up nicely. At the start of the scene, uh, before the action and talking and things started, you saw on the movie screen an image of a city. You could tell it was a big city. There were lots of buildings, tall ones, skyscrapers, and the cars and signs on the city streets looked old fashioned like they were from the past, like the 1940s. The other thing I noticed right away, from this first image, just when the scene started, was that the city seemed, uh, gloomy. You couldn't see much because it was, well, there was mostly darkness rather than sunlight, and there was only just a little bit of light from the street lamp, on top of that, it was raining, and kind of foggy. All of these details worked together to create a dark, gloomy, mysterious feeling. Though, then, when the action started, and it showed detectives talking to each other in an office, I already knew that the office was located in a tall building in a big city, sometime in the 1940s, and I, uh, had a good idea that the events that it'd be taking place would be pretty dark and mysterious, because of the shot, the image, I saw at the beginning of the scene. Using the professor's example, explain what an establishing shot is and how it is used. All right, um, so I have 30 seconds to prep this. I think I pretty much have it figured out. I'm gonna start in a second. All right, so 60 seconds on the clock, and we're just gonna do this thing. Let's go. Okay, so an establishing shot is a shot in a film that establishes a few things about the subsequent scene. In particular, it establishes the context or the setting of the scene, which is where and when we are. And the professor gave us a good example of this in the movie that he saw. He said that the establishing shot showed a wide angle view of a big city with lots of skyscrapers, and there were signs and cars that looked like they were from another time, like the 1940s. So just because he had that opening shot and that establishing shot, he was able to know that all the events in the story are taking place in the past and that they're taking place in a big city. Likewise, the mood is something else that was important here. The mood was gloomy and dark, kind of rainy, foggy. And so because of that appearance of the city, it gave him a more suspenseful, a more tense introduction to the film than he maybe would have had with a sunny day. All right. That was 60 seconds. I'm not super proud of that one. I think I could have done better. I think it took a little too long getting to the point about the mood. I wanna show you what I wrote. So yeah, so up here we got the establishing shot. Again, the stuff on the left here is just what I wrote from the reading. And I try to match it up. If you notice what I did there, like with content and setting, I'm basically trying to attach that to the skyscrapers and cars and all that other stuff. So that I make the connections when I speak. And then the mood part, I wrote down a bunch of the words he used and where he finished with the detectives in the office. See, I didn't quite get to that in mind. And I think maybe that would be a slightly negative point. I feel like I should be covering his ideas a little bit faster there. I think I maybe spent a little bit too much time defining establishing shot. I do think you need to do that though. You wanna open with a clear definition of what that term or concept is because that's showing the people that you understood the content. And then you get into the examples. And if you cover his examples, well, I do think I covered his examples. I don't think I missed any data that was really important. So I think that's good. But there's a balance there to strike between just talking about the concept, which is in the reading and then talking about his examples. And I maybe went too far into the reading on that one, to be honest. So I think I might wanna try to just focus a little bit more on his examples in that case. It's tough with a minute. You know, it's tough, I'll be honest. So why it's really important for you guys to practice. If you're preparing for this test, I strongly encourage you to practice speaking for 60 seconds. Like just get your timer on your phone, go stand in front of the mirror and try to talk about anything, pick a topic, talk about it for 60 seconds. Do that over and over as soon as the timer beeps, stop talking, repeat, go right back to it, do it again. If you do that five or six times a day, takes you less than 10 minutes, I guarantee you're gonna get better at this because you will have more of an internal clock that's gonna tell you when it's time to say this or when it's time to say that, when it's time to transition from an idea, you've spent too much time on this idea. I kinda have that in me because I've done a lot of public speaking in my life and I'm pretty good at knowing when it's time to shut up on a test, not in real life, but you know. So something to keep in mind. Now we're gonna go to the last one of these and this last one is just audio only. So again, just note taking is important here. We're gonna listen to this professor's lecture and then try to answer the question about it which is just gonna basically ask us to repeat a lot of the information. This is the final task of the speaking portion. Let me make sure we're, yeah, okay. We all know that insects like to eat plants but some plants have been able to develop ways to protect themselves from insects. Today I'm gonna talk about some ways plants defend themselves. Now, some plants have physical features that prevent insects from landing on them. Like the passion plant, for example, its leaves have little spiky hairs all over them. They're like spikes sticking out of the plant that are so numerous and dense that they prevent insects from landing on the leaves. Basically, there's just no room for the insect to land and since insects can't land on the leaves, they can't eat them. So, the ladle hairs serve as a physical feature that helps protect the passion plant from insects. All right, but other plants protect themselves using chemical defenses. Like the potato plant. The potato plant's able to release a chemical throughout its leaf system whenever an insect attacks it starts eating the leaf. So, say an insect starts eating a potato plant's leaf that will cause the plant to react by releasing a chemical throughout its leaf system. The insect swallows this chemical as it eats and this chemical discourages the insect from wanting to eat any more of the plant. How? Well, the substance makes the insect feel full like it's already had enough to eat. The insect no longer feels hungry. So, it stops eating the plant. So, by emitting this chemical, the potato plant protects itself from insects. Using points from the lecture, explain how the passion plant and the potato plant defend themselves from insects. Okay, using points from the lecture, explain how these two plants, yeah, protect themselves from insects. Okay, I think I got this. That was a little tricky to follow. It was going pretty fast. I did that intentionally to try to make this a little bit harder, but I think we got it under control. Let's set our timer for 60 seconds and give it our best shot. All right, so, in the lecture, the professor explains two different ways that plants like the passion plant and the potato plant are able to defend themselves against insects, which are a natural predator of these plants. The one way is physical. The passion plant has spiky hairs all over its stems and branches and the leaves, which make it difficult for the insect to actually land on the plant because there's no space for it to land there, so that effectively keeps insects from eating the plant. The other way that the potato plant uses is a chemical method where it produces a chemical inside of its cells and if an insect starts eating, let's say part of the leaf, then it will absorb that chemical and that chemical reduces the appetite of the insect. It makes it think that it's already full and so because of that, it will stop eating and that will protect the plant. So those are the two ways that the professor explained. Right on the dot, right on the dot. You'll love to see it. Look, look where I stopped it. I stopped it right there. It's got that little bit right there. Okay, that's essentially the way you wanna do it right there, my people. That one was good. So, again, I'll show you my notes so you can see what I did here. We've got this. So I did plants versus insects. I kind of like right away heard that. I wrote physical and started trying to follow the story, right? It's passion plants, spiky hairs, can't land. That was the insects. And then when she got to the chemical ones, I was like, okay, potato plant, eat a leaf, stops the appetite, feels full and I figure out the rest, right? So I just tried to grab those main ideas and explain them as best as I could and I think that everything went pretty well on that one. So just to recap a little bit of what we're talking about here. So you've got these four different types of speaking tasks. You've got two general categories, the independent and the integrated tasks. Integrated tasks, we're gonna have a reading which you're gonna wanna analyze a little bit and try to find some key points that you can use to make the audio easier. The last one is all audio and you're not gonna get any context. So you have to be ready to go. You have to be ready, like right away she jumped right in with the plants and insects thing. Didn't give me a lot of time to catch up to what we were talking about. So while the question for that is a little more explicit because it actually said passion plant and potato plant. I gotta be on my A game for that last task. That's why it's one of the last ones. It's kind of supposed to be the hard one because you don't have that context. With the other ones, use that reading to set up the audio to prepare yourself to do, you know, to take notes and think, okay, what should I be listening for? I wrote down leadership and organizational skills and when the girls said that, I knew I had the answer and I was able to give a pretty good response on that one. Time management, make sure that we, you know, we explain the context, we explain any key terms that we need to, but we also need to focus on the audio. Make sure we stay clearly in the audio and not just repeat a lot of stuff that was already in the text. Something I maybe could have done better on the third one. For the personal ones, remember you only have time for two reasons. 45 seconds, that's all you're gonna get. So make them count. And that my people is our total speaking worship for today. That is all I got going on. We've got some cool stuff coming out. I would love it if you guys had subscribed to the channel. If it's your first time here, thank you for being here. If it's not your first time here, thank you for being here also for coming back. We're gonna be doing some cool stuff. So I got a how to study in another country video coming out this Thursday. I got a very cool project that I've been working on for the last couple of weeks that's gonna be coming out after that about Peruvian education in a greater sense, global education issues. Just a little, kind of one of my rabbit holes, but I think it's gonna be cool. I think you're gonna like it. So thank you guys for stopping by and have a good night.