Key to Speaking Fast in English: Weak Form
Good day, everyone. Today, I want to talk about an important aspect of the TOEFL Speaking section: delivery—specifically, how to improve your speaking speed.
As you may already know, one key factor for achieving a high score in TOEFL Speaking is maintaining a high WPM (words per minute)—ideally around 150 words per minute. In my experience, speaking speed often matters more than perfect pronunciation. That is, faster speakers tend to score higher than slower, overly careful ones. Why? Because the tasks require you to summarize content effectively, and to do that, you must convey as many ideas as possible—which means saying more in less time.
Understanding English Rhythm
To speak English faster, you need to understand how English rhythm works. Linguists categorize languages by their rhythmic patterns, which is to say what provides regularity in speech. In English, such regularity is achieved by making stressed syllables occur in the same interval while speaking. For this reason, English is called a stress-timed language, unlike most languages in the world.
For example, Korean, French, and Spanish are syllable-timed languages, where each syllable takes up roughly the same amount of time. To speak quickly in those languages, you shorten each syllable evenly.
But that’s not how it works in English. In English, native speakers speed up by shortening the intervals between stressed syllables—not by speaking every word faster. In a stress-timed language like English, slow speech means there’s a longer gap between stressed syllables, while fast speech means the gap is shorter.
Weak Forms and Reduced Pronunciation
To shorten the time between stressed syllables, English speakers often reduce the vowel sound to schwa or drop some sounds or even unstressed syllables—a phenomenon called elision. These reduced sounds are softer, mumbled, and sometimes barely noticeable. If you haven’t trained your ear, you might not even hear them.
Viewed in this way, in English, there are two types of pronunciation:
Strong forms – the full dictionary pronunciation.
Weak forms – the reduced versions used in natural, fast speech.
Weak pronunciation usually affects function words—words that carry the grammatical structure of a sentence, not its main meaning. These include:
Pronouns (he, she, we, you)
Auxiliary verbs (would, should, have, do, is)
Articles (a, the)
Prepositions (to, of, at)
Conjunctions (and, but, or)
Function words are very frequently unstressed in a sentence, and when they are, their vowels often reduce to a schwa /ə/ or disappear entirely. This is crucial for achieving a native-like rhythm and flow in English. Let’s consider some examples.
Examples of Weak Pronunciation
"of," "have," "to," ‘or’ "a," and “the" => /ə/.
"of" often becomes /əv/ or just /ə/ (e.g., "cup o' tea").
"have" (as an auxiliary) often becomes /əv/ or /ə/ or /v/ (e.g., "could've done that" "they've gone").
"to" commonly becomes /tə/ or /ə/ (e.g., "go to bed", “got to do it”).
"or" frequently reduces to /ər/ /ə/ (e.g., "this or that” ).
"a" virtually always becomes /ə/ (e.g., "a cat" ).
“the” also is reduced to /ə/ (e.g., "Look at the cat” ).
"Has," "does," and "is" => /z/
"is" frequently becomes /z/ (e.g., "He's here" /hiːz hɪər/).
"has" (as an auxiliary) often becomes /z/ (e.g., "She's gone" /ʃiːz ɡɒn/).
"does" can be reduced to a /z/ sound (e.g., "How's he do it?" /haʊz hiː duː ɪt/).
"Had," "did," and modal verbs like "would," "should," "could" => /d/.
"would," "should," "could" are reduced to /d/ (e.g., "I would (should, could) do it").
“had” is reduced to /d/ (e.g., “I’d eaten)
"did" as an auxiliary can also be reduced significantly (e.g., "Where d'you go?" /wɛər dʒuː ɡoʊ/).
These reduced forms are so short that if you’re not listening carefully, you may miss them completely. for Example:
"Get me a book"
In fast speech, it may sound like: “Get me book,” because the "a" (schwa) can be almost imperceptible in very quick speech, making it sound like it's missing. Similarly,
“Where’s the office?”
may sound like: “Where office?” because the reduction of "is" to /z/ and "the" to /ðə/ (or even near omission) in rapid speech can lead to this perception.
Why Weak Pronunciation Matters
This weak pronunciation is one of the biggest challenges for non-native English speakers listening to fast, natural conversation. The sounds are fleeting, and context and your grammar knowledge becomes incredibly important for comprehension.
If you only pronounce what you clearly hear—ignoring these weakened forms—your sentences will sound ungrammatical, consider a show like Kim's Convenience. The parents, Appa and Umma, are first-generation Korean immigrants who have lived in Canada for many years. While they communicate effectively, their English often retains a distinct accent mainly due to speaking syllable-streded manner of Korean. Appa, for instance, might say:
"I am go to store. For few minutes."
when the natives would say “ I'm gonna go to the store for a few minutes
On the other hand, if you pronounce every function word using its full dictionary form, your speech will sound unnatural as it is off rhythm .
Conclusion and Next Steps
Without learning weak pronunciation, non-native speakers who only know the strong forms will always struggle with natural English rhythm. They may find fast native speech difficult to follow, and their own speech will sound robotic or unnatural.
But once you start learning and recognizing these reduced forms:
Your listening skills will improve.
Your speaking will become more fluent and natural.
While there’s no single weak pronunciation for every function word (it depends on surrounding sounds and speaking speed), there are predictable patterns that can be learned and mastered.
In the next part of this lecture, we’ll take a closer look at how function words are actually pronounced in real speech. We’ll break it down into:
Weak forms of pronouns
Weak forms of auxiliary verbs
Weak forms of articles
Weak forms of conjunctions
Weak forms of prepositions