If you need an “advanced” score of 26 on TOEFL iBT Speaking, I want to share the details about how to join me in Zoom for my upcoming classes where you’ll get feedback on TOEFL Task 1, 2, 3, and 4 responses (plus essential feedback about your accent) for 8 weeks — so you’re moving forward with your career goals.
Below, you’ll see lots of details about common questions:
- What’s the agenda for Speaking classes?
- How does Group Feedback work?
- What topics can I speak about?
- When are classes?
- When do we start?
- I don’t want to wait. How do I start earlier?
- I can’t attend classes. Are there recordings?
- How much does it cost?
- What’s the deadline to register?
- How do I join?
- Can I join the Monday Writing classes, too?
- I have more questions. How do I contact you?
I love the group classes I teach. The energy is always really great. These classes are an excellent chance to ask questions that you’ve been wondering — and then also get my feedback and see responses created by other ambitious students. Collectively, a group of students can answer more TOEFL Speaking responses than just you by yourself.
Many students who join my classes feel more energized and focused about studying for TOEFL iBT than they do by themselves.
Our Focus is *Always* How to Get S26
Whenever I give you feedback, I’m always assuming that you need an “advanced” score of 26… and my video below explains more about what that represents.
1. "What's the agenda?"
You will need 10-15 hours per week to prepare for these classes.
Every week, you’ll get specific preparation assignments from me. You’ll do preparation activities out of my e-courses, Understand How to Get S26+ video series and the workbook for Advanced Speaking Guide…
This is your preparation schedule:
- Wednesday October 20 – An Orientation to Advanced Speaking Scores
- Wednesday October 27 – How to Construct High-Scoring Responses for Task 1
- Wednesday November 3 – How to Construct High-Scoring Responses for Task 2
- Wednesday November 10 – Q&A about “Delivery” for TOEFL iBT Speaking: Pronunciation, Accent and Intonation
- Wednesday November 17 – How to Construct High-Scoring Responses for Task 3
- Wednesday November 24 – How to Construct High-Scoring Responses for Task 4
- Wednesday December 1 – Developing Automatic Reactions at TOEFL iBT (How to Fix Fossilized Errors, Part 1)
- Wednesday December 8 – Developing Automatic Reactions at TOEFL iBT (How to Fix Fossilized Errors, Part 2)
After you finish watching the preparation material, you’ll produce TOEFL Speaking responses.
That is the main goal of this 8-week program: producing TOEFL Speaking responses… a lot of them… and ideally, every single one of them should have the characteristics that contribute to a score of 26.
You’ll choose from the ones that you create which ones you want to bring to the Wednesday classes.
You can practice speaking your responses spontaneously — but for class, you’ll need to convert that audio file into a document that we can look at…
Below is a picture which an an example of what I mean…
You’ll type out an “ideal” version of your TOEFL response on a Google Doc. In class, you can read it to me so I can check your accent… but you need to have it typed out so that I can comment efficiently and clearly about your grammar, vocabulary and general approach.
For example…
2. "How does Group Feedback work?"
At the beginning of each class, I ask, “Who wants feedback today?” and the people who do type “yes” or “me” in chat. That creates the queue.
When it’s your turn, you’ll tell me which document to open. I use the “screen share” feature in Zoom to display a particular response so that we can see it together.
You’ll choose whether to read it out loud yourself (in which case I can check your accent) or if you want me to read it (in which case I can make suggestions to make your vocabulary or grammar sound more natural). Either way, we review your response and I give feedback about your strengths and areas to improve.
Because everyone is free to choose their own prompt, we have a great mix of responses for Task 1, 2, 3 or 4 each class. It’s rare that anyone produces the same topic… So during the 90 minutes, we’ll look at up to 10 responses and we cover a lot of ground.
Over the 8 weeks, the breakdown of the feedback is like this:
- Class 1. free topic — You choose either Task 1, 2, 3 or 4
- Class 2. Task 1 responses only
- Class 3. Task 2 responses only
- Class 4. Questions about Pronunciation or free topic
- Class 5. Task 3 responses only
- Class 6. Task 4 responses only
- Class 7. free topic — You choose which
- Class 8. free topic — You choose which
3. "What topics can I speak about?"
You can pick whichever prompts you want for Task 1, 2, 3 or 4 responses. This allows you to choose easier or more difficult topics, depending on your current skill level at the moment.
In terms of which source of practice to use, you can use any TPO website or database of realistic practice material.
4. "When are classes?"
Wednesdays from 3 PM to 4:30 PM California / Pacific Standard Time — so you may need to adjust to your time zone, depending on where you are.
5. "When do we start?"
The first class is Wednesday October 20… but you’ll need to prepare by watching video lectures, so you will be busy at least from October 15!
6. "I don't want to wait. How do I start sooner?"
After you pay and register, you will get the preparation schedule for classes. You can begin preparing now and ticking things off the To Do list.
By starting now, you’ll finish the preparation activities — which means that you’ll have more time to create Speaking responses… which means that by the time classes start, you’ll already have improved.
By registering now, you will see bigger improvements.
7. "I can't attend class. Are there recordings?"
YES, there will be recordings.
I started using a new hosting website to host these video recordings. The website miraculously and automatically transcribes what I say… It’s amazingly accurate without me editing it! And it puts subtitles on the video recordings — like in the picture below. So you can literally see all the words that I’m saying.
The best part of that is that you can search the video transcripts for keywords… and then you can jump to that part of the video. For sure, reviewing is way more efficient with this.
HOWEVER, there are 2 very important caveats:
1) In order to get feedback, you need to be there to actually talk to me and ask any questions that you have while I’m reading your essay and giving feedback. I’m promising to be available to you during that 90 minutes, so if you send me your TOEFL response outside of class and say, “Jaime I was too busy so can you please just take a look at my response and give me feedback? Here’s my response…” I make absolutely no guarantees about how soon I can give you that feedback — or even if I can. You might not get feedback. To get the best experience, you need to be there live. If this format doesn’t work for you, then you can click here to see the options to purchase my private feedback or private lessons.
2) You will have a limited amount of time to watch these class video recordings. For a wide variety of reasons, the video recordings are not permanent or downloadable so you must stay organized and motivated to get the information that you need from them soon after classes finish.
8. "How much does it cost?"
Option 1: The Group-Only Plan
This bundle includes the 4 items that you need for these classes:
- item #1: a seat in my 8 weeks of Zoom classes for Speaking $200
- item #2: preparation material:
- My newer e-course, Understand How to Get S26+ (normally $250 but you get 50% off)
- My older e-course, The Advanced Speaking Guide (normally $127 but you get 50% off)
- item #3: The Deck of prompts for Speaking Task 1, plus a seat in my private Facebook Group where I share lots of extra model responses for Task 1 (normally $40 but you get 20% off)
The cost for Option 1 is $482. All the feedback is in the group.
Option 2: Everything above plus Private Feedback
In addition to everything in Option 1, this also includes my service, Understand How to Fix Fossilized Errors. By adding this, you also get:
- Follow-up after the end of group classes
- Private feedback on 8 TOEFL Speaking responses (2 tests) OR 2 TOEFL essays and 4 TOEFL Speaking file (1 test)
- 3 Memory Pouches to retrain “fossilized” mistakes with grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation
a seat in my live Zoom class to learn how to use Memory Pouches - A personalized study schedule of what to keep studying in order to keep seeing an improvement
- Click to see more details and student reviews
This personal package, Understand How to Fix Fossilized Errors, adds $450 to the cost — so the total for Option 2 is $482 + $450 = $932.
If you need a special payment plan to break that into 3 monthly payments, let me know!
9. "What's the deadline to register for classes?"
Class is limited to a maximum of 10 students.
Theoretically, the deadline to enroll is Thursday October 14… but if all the seats fill up before that, it’ll be too late.
If you want to reserve your seat or discuss a payment plan, you should tell me today!
10. "How do I join?"
Step 1: Configure your classes for either Option 1 or Option 2. By clicking either of the 2 links below, you visit my website where you configure the class focus and add to cart.
Step 2: Choose “Speaking Classes” and then add the bundle to your cart.
Step 3: Finish paying on my website with PayPal, credit card or debit card.
After you pay, you will have an account on my website with immediate access to the e-course preparation material.
11. "Can I enroll in Writing classes too?"
If you can study without distractions for 25-30 hours per week (which is 6-7 hours per day every day for 5 days every week) for the next 8 weeks, then yes, you can also enroll in Speaking classes.
Note: You will need other e-courses for the Writing classes, and that changes the prices. So in that case, please contact me so we can discuss it.
12. "I have more questions. How do we talk about those?"
On the Contact page of my website, I explain how to get in touch with me. I don’t list it here because there are robots that crawl webpages and add this information to databases for spam, so please visit my Contact page…