Welcome back to the Dr. Byrnes TOEFL Show!
Today, we’re training your TOEFL Speaking – Listen and Repeat skills!
Now, here’s the biggest concern students always have:
👉 “How can I remember every single word perfectly?”
Ready for the secret?
You don’t memorize the sentence word by word.
No — that’s not realistic when a sentence has more than 10 words,
and some of the sentences in this task are that long.
Instead, you remember the sentence by thought groups,
especially by remembering the content words.
Thought groups are units of meaning.
Here’s an example:
Original sentence:
“The professor explained the concept to the students after class.”
Break it into thought groups:
The professor explained the concept /
to the students /
after class
By breaking it into thought groups,
you only need to remember three big ideas:
who did what
to whom
and when
Dr. Byrnes has several videos showing how to chunk sentences into thought groups.
Now here’s the second strategy:
👉 Focus on content words in each thought group.
Content words are the words that carry the main meaning.
These are usually nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
In our example, the content words are:
professor, explained, concept, students, class
That’s only five words you really need to remember and pronounce clearly.
In fact, the ETS scoring rubric is very clear:
Content words must be pronounced correctly and clearly.
So what’s the opposite of content words?
👉 Function words.
In our example, function words are:
the, to, the, after
These words are necessary for grammar,
but in natural speech, they’re usually reduced.
And that’s exactly how native speakers talk.
Native speakers emphasize content words
and de-emphasize function words.
Emphasizing means saying a word clearly and with higher pitch.
De-emphasizing means saying it faster, with lower pitch,
so it sounds softer and a little mumbly.
Why do native speakers do this?
👉 To create rhythm.
That’s the secret of English rhythm:
Stress content words and unstress function words.
Dr. Byrnes has many free videos showing how to build English rhythm.
They’re super helpful if you want to sound natural
and aim for a high TOEFL score.