The TOEFL independent speaking task gives you about fifteen seconds to prepare and forty-five seconds to answer a question about a preference or an opinion. Nobody is marking which side you take; they are marking whether you develop it. These 40 items train the two habits that decide the score: committing to a position immediately and attaching a concrete detail to every reason.
Take whichever side you can support with a story from your own life. Deliberating costs preparation time you need for content.
Side, reason one, the detail, reason two. Four scribbles. A script you cannot read back is worse than nothing.
‘I’d rather study in the morning, for two reasons.’ The rater now knows the shape of the whole answer.
A named time, place or number turns a claim into development. This is where most of the score is won.
‘The second reason is simply that …’ around the thirty-second mark keeps the structure audible and stops you drifting.
Repair a mistake once, in passing, and move on. Two repairs of the same phrase cost more than the original error.
If the timer is close, finish the sentence you are in rather than opening a new idea. A clean stop sounds controlled; a cut-off clause does not.
Forty-five seconds has to feel familiar. Record, listen back and check where the seconds went; the opening is usually the thief.
Not this“Well, that’s a really interesting question and I’ve thought about it a lot.”
This“I’d rather study in the morning, for two reasons.”
The memorised opening spends five of your forty-five seconds and develops nothing.
Not thisNaming three reasons and explaining none.
ThisGiving one reason with an example and a second in one sentence.
The rubric rewards development, so a list reads as thin however many items it contains.
Not this“It’s better because it’s better for everyone.”
This“It saves about two hours a week, which I spend on lab reports.”
Circular support adds no content; a number or a named consequence does.
Not thisChanging sides halfway through.
ThisStaying with the first position.
A change of side leaves the answer with two half-developed ideas and no line of argument.
Not thisStopping at twenty-five seconds.
ThisFilling the time with an example.
An unfinished response is scored as underdeveloped, and silence cannot be recovered.
Not thisSpeaking as fast as possible to fit more in.
ThisSpeaking steadily with clear word endings.
Intelligibility is part of the score; content nobody can decode does not count.
40 original questions. The first 10 are open to everyone. Answers are checked in your browser and never sent to us, so you can share this page with a class as it is.
1Complete with a number.
4Complete with one noun beginning with p.
6Write a fifteen-second plan (three or four notes) for “Do you prefer to study in the morning or at night?”
One good answer
morning / 1 fresher → remember more / ex: 40 terms before 9 / 2 quieter, no messages
7Complete with one noun beginning with e.
9Complete with one noun beginning with p.
11Complete with one noun beginning with r.
13Complete with one word beginning with w.
14Turn this note into a spoken sentence: “morning / fresher / 40 terms before 9”.
One good answer
I prefer mornings because my mind is fresher then — last week I memorized forty new terms before nine o’clock, and that would have taken me twice as long at night.
15Complete with the past participle of a verb beginning with u.
19Complete with one noun beginning with s.
21Complete with the past participle of a verb beginning with a.
23Complete with one noun beginning with c.
24Write the first two sentences of an answer to “Should universities require students to take courses outside their major?”
One good answer
Yes, they should. Studying one subject alone makes it easy to miss how other fields think — a statistics class completely changed the way I read history papers.
27Complete with one noun beginning with c.
29Complete with one noun beginning with l.
31Complete with one noun beginning with d.
33Complete with one noun beginning with t.
37Complete with the -ing form of a verb beginning with g.
39Complete with one noun beginning with p.
40Give one habit that reliably adds ten seconds of real content to an independent answer.
One good answer
Attach a named detail to every reason — a number, a place or a time — so that “it saves time” becomes “it saves about two hours a week, which I use for lab reports”.
Note
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No. Raters score how well you develop the position, not which one it is. Take whichever side you can illustrate with something that actually happened to you.
Yes. Nobody verifies it. What matters is that the example is specific and plausible, because specificity is what turns a claim into development.
Go back to your example and give its result: what changed, by how much, what you did next. Extending one idea always beats reaching for a new one at thirty seconds.
No. Fifteen seconds is enough for four keywords, and reading a half-written script aloud produces the flat, hesitant delivery raters penalise.
A few are normal and natural in spoken English. Long silences and repeated restarts are the problem, because they break the flow the delivery score is based on.