What does the TOEFL mean by pacing? During the speaking section, you will have SpeechRater and human raters who will listen to and score your speaking tasks. The more clearly you speak, the higher your spoke will be. Therefore, improving your pacing will improve your TOEFL speaking score.
What does the TOEFL mean by pacing?
Pacing refers to the number of pauses and hesitations during your TOEFL speaking tasks. You should not use too many unnecessary pauses and hesitations. If you do, SpeechRater and the human raters listening to your speaking tasks will score you lower.
What is an example of bad pacing?
Generally, having 5-10 pauses in a single sentence represents bad pacing. In the example sentence below, you see ten pauses. These are too many pauses to score high on TOEFL speaking tasks.
- The author / in the / reading passage / defines / subliminal perception, / and / the speaker / in the lecture / gives an / example to illustrate / the concept.
What does the TOEFL mean by pacing? What is an example of good pacing?
For the most part, pauses after a thought group of 5-6 content words represent good pacing. In addition, you should make pauses after natural breaks in the sentence you speak. For example, natural breaks can occur after introductory clauses or phrases and transition words. The below sentence has one pause after the first independent clause. Thus, this sentence has good pacing.
- The author in the reading passage defines subliminal perception, / and the speaker in the lecture gives an example to illustrate the concept.
How do I improve my pacing?
- Increase your listening exposure
- Speak a lot of natural English with native speakers
- Write your speaking responses, identify the pauses, and record yourself reading the script while making appropriate pauses.
Watch an instructional video on pacing.
Watch the following video to learn more about pacing:
Michael Buckhoff, mbuckhoff@aol.com