Hadar Shemesh helps Bahar tackle TOEFL speaking anxiety and the 60-second time limit. The fix: spend 10 seconds planning a three-part structure, record yourself, and practice daily with new questions. Most people struggle with stress, not English.
Hello, Heather. I'm Bahar. I'm a new follower. The reason I'm sending this video is I have a question for you and I want to raise my confidence in speaking skills. My problem is with TOEFL questions. I understand the passage, reading passage, and I totally understand the audio. But. But when the questioner tells me that I have 60 seconds to answer, I totally mess up the words, the paraphrasing structure and the tense of the verbs and eventually I lose time. What should I do? Thank you for your time.
Okay. Hey, Bahar, thank you so much for this great, great question. Question. Now, let's begin with the fact that even I get stressed out if I need to organize my thoughts and execute them in less than 60 seconds. Sometimes it takes me time just to understand what I'm trying to say within a minute of speaking. And by the way, it has nothing to do with English. It happens to me in my native language as well. So I can understand the pressure. And between you and me and everybody else watching, I find that it's totally unfair to test someone's speaking skills by putting them in this type of pressure. But we're not going to talk about that right now. We're going to talk about how to prepare so you can succeed in the test. Now, again, remember that if you don't succeed, it says nothing about your English skills and your fluency. It really says all about how you can manage your. You're speaking under stress in a second language, which is usually not the case when we communicate. But again, I showed my resentment to this exercise already. So here is the thing. I always say that to get better at something, you need to do more of that something. That's it. So if you need to get better at speaking in this time frame of one minute about different topics, it's not about improving your grammar, it's not about learning more words, and it's definitely not about improving your pronunciation. It's all about how to organize your thoughts really quickly and express them really quickly in under one minute. So what I would recommend for you to do is to download a list of different questions either from test websites or if you just type in conversation topics or questions for English tests, you can find a ton of lists online. And then every day you want to practice reading the question without preparing in advance, thinking about it for 10 seconds. And when you think about it, you want to organize three ideas, right? You want to organize the opening the main thing that you want to talk about. Maybe think of one or two examples and then closing, right? Opening Middle and closing. That's what you want to think about really quickly and then to practice speaking while timing yourself. Okay? Because the skill is to do it in under one minute. And the more you do it, the more you become confident at your ability to. To do that in under one minute. Right. Without getting all stressed out. And that alone can do a lot to your performance in the test, because a lot of it has to do with confidence, right? You know, the video that you just sent me is a video of under one minute where you expressed a clear idea. You were clear, your grammar was great, your pronunciation was great, Everything was great. Right? I would totally pass you. So without knowing that you are being tested, it. It's easy. So you need to develop the skill of doing something under pressure, preparing for the test until you build that confidence in you that it's possible for you, right? So that when you get asked a question or when you get to that part in the test, you're like, I got this. This is not scary to me. I can totally do it. I've done it. I know I'm able to do it again. All right, so. So that's the mindset and confidence aspect. Now back to the technical aspect of organizing your thoughts clearly. That's a skill too. Everything is a skill, right? So this is something that you'll be practicing by doing it at least once a day, again and again and again. And if you want to get really fancy, you can record yourself, listen to it, give yourself some notes, try to implement it again so you can record it again, and then the next day, think of the notes you've given yourself previous day, right? Maybe you didn't have enough examples, or maybe your grammar was inconsistent, or maybe you weren't very clear. And try to focus on that in addition to, you know, all the other things that you're focusing on when answering the question. But like I said, you want to get better at something, do more of that something. Bahar, I have no doubt that you can pass it with flying colors. You got to believe in yourself. I. I have full faith in you, and I can't wait for you to write back to me telling me that you have passed the test. You have my support. You have the community support. Good luck, and I hope this helped.
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