Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Take an Interview: Interview 2 — getting to campus and green spaces, Interview 3 — student jobs and shopping…
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The spoken interview, run out loud with an examiner that asks and does not help, and a report at the end on what a rater listens for.
Speaking is the shortest section on the TOEFL iBT® test — 11 items in about 8 minutes — and it splits into two task types. This category covers the interview, which is 4 of those 11 items. It aims at the CEFR range from A1 to C2 and is scored against what you say rather than against a key.
What it measures is whether you can answer a question and develop the answer: clearly, in order, with accurate grammar, varied vocabulary, and speech that is easy for a proficient English speaker to follow. That last one is the one people forget — stress, rhythm and intonation are part of what is judged, not just the words.
The other speaking task type plays a spoken sentence for you to repeat back, and accounts for the remaining 7 items. It cannot be practiced here, because there is no audio; the track page says so too. Use the official sample test for it.
The whole speaking section gives you about eight minutes. An answer that is grammatically perfect and two sentences long does not give a rater enough to judge, and the specification asks for elaboration explicitly. The shape that works is: answer the question directly, give a reason, give a concrete instance, stop. Most weak answers either stop after the first part or never get past general statements.
The other common failure is treating it as a test of opinions. It is not; there is no correct view. It is a test of whether you can develop one out loud, in order, without stalling.
The examiner asks, listens and moves on. It does not rephrase the question because you paused, it does not tell you whether an answer was good, and it does not fill your silence — all three of which a real interviewer also declines to do. At the end you get a report on the four things that are judged: coherence and development, grammatical accuracy, range of vocabulary, and how intelligible the speech is.
Use the microphone. This is the whole point of the category. An answer that is easy to think through is frequently impossible to say fluently the first time, and discovering that on test day, with four items and no warm-up, is avoidable.
No score is issued, deliberately: ETS scores the real thing on the 1 to 6 scale, and an invented number would resemble it without meaning anything.
Every interview question here is written by Zestly. No official test material is reproduced, facts about the test format are paraphrased from the published specification rather than copied from it, and no result from this tool is an official score.
TOEFL iBT® is a registered trademark of ETS. This product is not endorsed or approved by ETS.
