June 2025 TOEFL Speaking Schedule

Here's the schedule for next month. We are busier than I planned in May, so I opened a Sunday afternoon class in May. So orientation for June must be on a weeknight.

Weeknight classes are from 7-10 p.m. Weekend morning classes are 10:00-13:00 and afternoon classes are 3-6 p.m.

Orientation will be Thursday, May 29, from 7-10:30 p.m. Attendance at orientation is required for all new students.

All classes are taught by Donald Miller and are limited to five students per class.

Question from a student

 A student asked me about factors for language-learning success. Here are ten things off the top of my head:

• Basic skills like listening and vocabulary are crucial. 
• Daily practice effort is very important, too. 
• Getting a lot of high-quality sleep is important to learn anything. If you drink 2+ alcoholic beverages, you will probably not get high-quality sleep.
• It's easier for bilingual people to learn a third language than it is for monolingual people to learn a second language.
• Some people are more observant than other people (they recognize patterns and nuance well). 
• Younger people tend to do better than older people.
• Women tend to speak more clearly than men (pronunciation).
• Smokers often do better than non-smokers (I think it's because they're used to meeting people in the smoking area at work and making small-talk with strangers).
• People who play a musical instrument or sing are often more sensitive to intonation than people who don't.
• Lots of lawyers struggle because they are used to legalese.

Capitalization and Comma Errors

Here are the answers to the "Common Mistakes" handout this week. Corrections are mostly in red:

1. I saw beautiful coral reefs and yellow, red, and blue tropical fish.

2. I like to watch CNN nNews on YoutTube.

3. I saw a short video about the origin of the universe on the TED tTalk app yesterday.

4. I like the characters, especially Elsa, and songs, such as 'Let it gGo.'

5. I watched famous comedy movies, such as "Breakfast at Tiffany's.”. (The period goes inside the quotation marks)

6. So, I watch entertaining movies, especially heroic movies or adventure movies, like 007.

7. Shuri-jyo was built in the 1400’s.

8. She was a faster swimmer than I was, and she inspired me to practice hard every week.

9. People often make mistakes, so it is necessary to double check reports.

10. We practiced throwing, running, and tackling everyday after school.

11. So, I agree with Francisco.

12. Also, I did yoga and swam, like freestyle and breastroke, at the fitness club.

Common INT WR Topics

ETS likes some topics better than others, and one of them is the "vanished civilization." These topics can appear on the reading, listening, and writing sections. When they appear on the integrated writing task, the reading passage will provide three hypotheses for why the civilization disappeared, and the lecture will show why each hypothesis is unlikely. So I was interested to find this video on YouTube this morning and thought I'd share it with you. Enjoy!

Academic Discussion task 12

 I just took the Academic Discussion 12 writing test. This time, I wanted to organize my essay a little differently (we'll talk about this in class this week). Since this is scored by the AI, I can't be sure that you'll get similar results with the human rater. 

Results were typical: 7 minutes, 141 words, 5.0 score.

2023 Year End Results

Forty-four students completed at least four months of TOEFL speaking classes at E4TG in 2023. Four of them have not yet replied to me, so this is based on the 40 whose self-reported data I've got. The mean top TOEFL speaking score was 22.1, and the median was 22. The range was 18~24. 

These are, frankly, lower speaking scores than in previous years. I think part of the reason is the new test format. During the ten minute break between the listening and speaking sections prior to August 2023, test-takers could hear what other people were talking about and guess the questions. You can no longer do that.

The mean TOEFL score was 102.85, and the median was 102. The range was 85~112. This is pretty good. Anecdotally, it seems like writing scores were higher, and I'll measure that more precisely next year.

We had two 帰国子女 students in 2023. Their results are not included above.

Mouth Stretching

Many Japanese people have limited range of motion with their mouth and tongue because Japanese has relatively few sounds. So when you speak Japanese, you don't need to smile (for L, S, and æ), put your tongue between your teeth (TH), or move your tongue back (R). Unsurprisingly, these are sounds that Japanese adults struggle with. Here's a good video I recommend to all my students.

Academic Discussion #2 (again): another experiment

 Hans did another experiment on ETS's practice academic discussion #2. 

This has 120 words, and he deliberately tried to write in generalizations, with little concrete detail. E-rater gave it 4.0.

Academic Discussion 12

The content of this essay is deliberately bad. The question was the best way to evaluate teachers. I wrote that the best teachers allow their students to play video games instead of studying. Perfect grammar, dumb content. You can read it for yourself. 

155 words, 9 minutes, 5.0.

So you can fool e-rater with nonsense. The AI is not evaluating content, only grammar.

 

Mistake of the Day: scores and points

 I was scoring essays yesterday and came across this common mistake:

• I got 23 scores on the TOEFL exam.

There are two problems here. One is that the writer means "points," not "scores." The other is that the writer means "on the TOEFL speaking section," rather than "exam. So this is correct:

• I got 23 on the TOEFL speaking section." 

Academic Discussion 11

Here's my academic discussion essay for task 11. There's nothing surprising here. 153 words, 6 minutes, 5.0 score. I think I've got a pretty good handle on what the AI is looking for: you need 130+ words with few misspellings and grammar errors for a top score.

Mistake of the Day: Due

 This week, one of our questions is about meeting a deadline. Every time we use this question, we get responses like, "I finished my essay before the due." 

The mistake here is that the speaker thinks the word "due" is a noun, when it's actually a adjective. So the correct way to express this idea is: "I finished my essay by the due date."

"The essay is due on Friday," has the same grammatical structure as "The man is happy on Friday." 

Please use English well!

iBT Academic Discussion Writing Task (a summary)

 So I've written essays on the first ten topics that ETS has posted online (link: https://www.ets.org/toefl/ibt-enhancements/prep.html). Here are some results:

1. Every essay that has been 130+ words and grammatically accurate has scored 5.0.
2. One essay at 132 words, that had at least nine grammar mistakes and eight spelling mistakes got 4.0.
3. Essay 5 had 119 words and no grammar mistakes and got 5.0.
4. Essay 8 had 121 words and no grammar mistakes and got 4.0.
5. Every essay that had fewer than 119 words has scored 4.0.

Two easy generalizations:

1. You want to write more than 130 words in your essay to get 5.0 from e-rater.
2. You can't make too many grammar and spelling mistakes.

Next question: is e-rater assessing vocabulary level? 

• If you write 130+ words with only one and two syllable words, can you still get 5.0? 
• If you write 100 words and use a lot of long and academic vocabulary, can you get 5.0?

We'll find out soon.

Task 10 + grammar errors

 This time I took the basic content of the previous task 10 essay and re-wrote it, adding grammar and spelling mistakes. Five minutes, 132 words. I count at least nine grammar mistakes and eight misspellings.

Score: 4.0

Task 10

 Here's my task 10 essay. Six minutes to write and two minutes to get the word count down to 132 words.

Score: 5.0.

So it appears that you need 130+ words to get 5.0, with no grammar mistakes. Let check grammar next.