TOEFL Booster / An ODD approach to speaking tasks
Lawrence J. Zwier Special to The Daily Yomiuri
Of the six speaking tasks in the Internet-based TOEFL (iBT), two are "independent" and four are "integrated." In the independent tasks, you express your views or preferences about a topic suggested in a prompt. In the integrated tasks, you use information from listening passages and reading passages to formulate your responses. In this month's TOEFL Booster, we will look at the independent speaking tasks and at the content needed in good responses.
Here are some sample independent-speaking prompts like those you might see on an iBT:
1. Think of a room that was special to you as a child and describe why it was special. Describe specific aspects of the room in your response.
2. Some students like to have the security that campus police officers can provide. Other students think the presence of campus police officers creates an overly strict atmosphere at a university. Which of these positions do you think is closest to correct and why?
The first thing you will notice about prompts like these is that there is no "correct" answer. As long as your response delivers what the prompt asks for, the content of it cannot be wrong. If you say your bedroom was special to you as a child, no rater can say: "That's incorrect. It was not special to you." If you say that you like having a strong campus police force, no rater can say you're wrong.
This means that when you put together your response, you have relatively few decisions to make. That's a good thing, because you have only 15 seconds to prepare before you start to speak. If you want to jot down notes to use as you speak, use the ODD method: Overall, Detail, Detail.
First, jot down a note to yourself about the overall answer to the prompt's implied question. For our first sample prompt, your "overall" note might be bedroom or animal room in museum or any other phrase that specifies which room was special to you. For our second prompt, you might simply write "good" or "bad" to indicate your position about campus police.
Next, quickly think of two details or reasons you could mention to give substance to your response. For the first prompt, they might be soft light, cool and breezy, safe feeling--anything that might be memorable about a room. For the second, your detail notes might be discourage fights, prevent bike theft, keep drug dealers out--any reason why (if this is your position) a big police presence is good.
With these very brief ODD notes, you have as much as you need to make a substantive response. If you think of more details as you speak, fine. Add them. But even if you don't think of more, you will be okay.
Deciding quickly on your answer is import!ant. If you spend a lot of time weighing several possibilities, you could be stuck with nothing to say when you are told to speak. It is more import!ant to choose something than to choose exactly the right thing. After all, no relevant response can be wrong.
"What room was special to me? Well, there's my bedroom. But then again, I liked my first-grade classroom. No, it's the children's room at the library...or..." If you get caught in a long search for exactly the right overall response, things could go badly for you.
Frankly, it really doesn't matter whether the room you choose even exists. That's right: It doesn't matter whether you tell the truth or not. If you can't think of an answer that is true, make one up.
To do so is not cheating. The speaking section of the iBT aims to eval!uate your speaking skills, not your memory. The rubrics used by the raters to eval!uate your response mention that the response must be relevant to the task, but there are no content requirements beyond that.
The most import!ant part of your independent speaking response is the very first sentence. This is especially true in terms of content. If you convince a rater that your response is relevant to the topic, you have gone a long way toward a good score. To do this, you must make sure you understand exactly what the prompt is asking for.
Let's look again at our first sample prompt:
"Think of a room that was special to you as a child and describe why it was special. Describe specific aspects of the room in your response."
The key words and phrases in this prompt are highlighted in bold print.
Imagine a response that starts with, "My favorite place is the hill right outside the campus museum." This would get a very low rating. Why? It should be easy for you to see that this beginning sentence indicates a misunderstanding of the prompt. For one thing, the speaker has focused on a place but not a room. For another, the speaker is describing a current favorite. The prompt asked for a room that was special during the speaker's childhood.
A far better start would have been something like: "When I was a child, my favorite room was my grandmother's kitchen." This is clearly relevant. Also, it sets up the expectation that a description of the kitchen will reveal why it was a favorite. This might be something like: "It was bright and cheery, with white walls bathed in the light from a huge window flanked by crisp white curtains. It usually smelled like chocolate-chip cookies. When my grandma stood in her kitchen, surrounded by bright copper pots, she often sang a song from long ago, a gentle tune that brought a smile to her face..." And so on. All the key words and phrases from the prompt are addressed in this response.
Next month's TOEFL Booster will look at more features, other than content, that make for good independent speaking responses.
Zwier teaches at Michigan State University and is an author of "The Michigan Guide to Academic Success and Better TOEFL Scores."
(May. 4, 2007)