When you take the TOEFL iBT Speaking test, if you are making fossilized mistakes with grammar, vocabulary or accent, that is a major reason why your Speaking score is stuck at 23, 24 or 25. And until you discover a process or tools to help you retrain those mistakes so that you don’t make them and your English just gets a lot more accurate in general, you will continue getting those low scores.
My name is Jaime Miller and since 2010, I’ve been helping pharmacists, physical therapists and nurses get speaking scores of 26. From all of those years of working with students, I can tell you that it’s not enough if an English teacher shows you where the mistake is. Because for example, a lot of my students make a mistake like this. They forget the “S” at the end.
So here you can see it like this should be “illustrates”, but when they talk, they just forget that. Or on Task 2, maybe they just say “student_” not “students” with the “S” sound, right? So my students can make those mistakes. And they know — often they know that they’re making the mistake because like, this is a basic grammar topic that your teacher probably taught you about years ago.
This isn’t new information for you. And like the idea of putting an “S” on plural nouns, it’s also not new. So this is what I mean, when I say it’s not enough for a teacher to tell you, “Oh, you’re making a mistake there. You’re making a mistake there” because most students say, “Well, yeah, I know… I know about that too.”
But what they don’t know is how to change those mistakes and retrain them so that they stop making them in the first place. Right? That is one of the biggest differences between my program and my focus for helping you prepare for TOEFL iBT. Yeah, of course, it’s my job to identify places that you need to, to improve — grammar mistakes and whatnot.
But more than that, it’s my job to help you retrain those so that your English is just more accurate and you don’t make the mistakes in the first place, right? So from years of working with students in your situation, I developed “The Effective Speaking in Action Method.” And it’s a, it’s a whole curriculum. So right now I’m just showing you one part of it.
But one of the parts that I developed was these Memory Pouches. So there’s Memory Pouch 1, Memory Pouch 2, and Memory Pouch 3. And these work together. There’s protocols, almost like a study recipe on the back that explains like how to do it step by step-by-step. And there’s one protocol for Memory Pouch 1. There’s a different protocol for Memory Pouch 2. And there’s a third protocol for Memory Pouch 3. And with these, we put your mistakes (into them). I don’t know if THESE are your mistakes. You’re probably making different ones and maybe you’re making one or two of these, but then you’re probably also making more mistakes than just these. So during my diagnostic process, we identify the most common mistakes that you’re making.
And then you’ve got the pouches that you can study with on a regular basis to retrain your accuracy. The good news about this — because this (process) is not new… I’ve been doing this for years, but I can tell you that when my students in the past have done this regularly, they’ve used these for 3 months or sometimes 5 or 6 or 8 months, depending on how much of an improvement they need. Some people have to put that kind of time in — but the results that people get from it is dramatically improved English to the point where I’ve been able to calculate that on average people improve by about 80% when they really improve and like use this process the way that I designed it.
There are teachers out there that don’t have a protocol for you to improve your mistakes. Yeah. They can identify the mistake, but how are you going to fix it? How are you going to retrain that? Do you have a process for that? You know, of course, it’s going to take effort on your part. You have to commit time to that, to retrain and develop that automatic accuracy, but you need to be studying with somebody (a tutor) who understands that that’s possible and how to do it.
The service that you want to look for is my introductory consultation. As part of the program, Understand How to Fix Fossilized Errors. That’s where I listen to your speaking. I look at your essays (if that’s something that you need help with). And then out of that, I pull the issues that you’re having that are going to be the most likely reason why your Speaking score is stuck. And then you put those flashcards into the Memory Pouches, you follow the protocols on the back, you use it regularly. And with enough practice, your English changes and you retrain those mistakes so that you’re not making them in the first place.