Luis joined a TOEFL Course to improve his pronunciation because, in the last two TOEFL exams he took, he was told that he had problems with his intelligibility.
First, he took the pre-test for vowel and consonant sounds by recording his responses to the exercises online at the Voxopop Discussion Group for The 7-Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT. Then founder, materials writer, and owner Michael Buckhoff listened to his pre-test, gave him an intelligibility score, and recommended specific lessons to help Luis improve his pronunciation. Luis worked hard completing all the practice exercises and regularly recorded his voice so he could monitor his progress.
Second, once he had solved his problems with vowel and consonant sounds, Luis was ready to take the second pre-test, this one diagnosing potential problems with syllable division and grammatical word endings, word stress, sentence rhythm, intonation, thought groups, and blending. This pre-test took him about 10 minutes to complete, and like his first pre-test, he recorded it online at the Voxopop Discussion Group for The 7-Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT. As Luis had suspected, once Michael listened to this pre-test, he discovered that Luis had problems with stress, tone, thought groups, and blending. Therefore, Michael recommended that Luis study a total of 18 lessons to help him improve his intelligibility in those areas. Luis noticed that these pronunciation lessons were more advanced than the vowel and consonant sound lessons had had studied previously. Nevertheless, Luis worked furiously on these lessons so he could improve. In fact, he spent about an hour a day for 12 days working on these exercises and pronunciation drills.
Third, having completed all the lessons in the pronunciation part of The 7-Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT, Luis was now ready for the real test. He needed to complete the post-test so that Michael, his TOEFL pronunciation and speaking mentor, could evaluate Luis’s pronunciation in all areas imaginable: vowels, consonants, syllable division, grammatical word endings, stress, sentence rhythm, intonation, thought groups, and blending. And that is exactly what he did. Like the previous two pre-tests, Luis recorded his post-test at the Voxopop Discussion Group for his TOEFL course. Similarly, just like the last two pre-tests, Michael, his TOEFL pronunciation and speaking mentor, listened to and evaluated his post-test. And Luis was delighted to know, according to Michael, that he had improved his intelligibility of American English. In fact, the only suggestion that Michael gave to Luis was that he review the lessons relating to phrasing and blending. All other areas of his speech were very clear.
Finally, Luis knew that it was now time to him to begin completing independent and integrated speaking practice tests so that his TOEFL speaking mentor could continue to guide him toward scoring 26/30.