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Course details
Explore comprehensive course materials and learning objectives designed for your growth.
About the course
Speaking is the section students improve least, because it is the only one you cannot practise silently. Reading and listening can be done alone on a train. Speaking requires you to talk out loud, badly, in front of someone who will tell you what went wrong — and almost nobody arranges that for themselves.
This lab arranges it. Fourteen people, one hour a week, everyone speaks every session, and every recording is scored against the official rubric.
Rolling, not a course
There is no start and no finish. Join in any week; the material cycles through the four task types every fortnight and repeats indefinitely with new prompts. Students typically stay two to four quarters — long enough to move a band or two — and then stop. That is the intended shape and there is no penalty for leaving.
Billing is quarterly rather than monthly because meaningful speaking gains take about twelve weeks and a monthly cycle encourages people to quit in week five, which is exactly when it feels worst and is about to get better.
A session
Ten minutes: warm-up in pairs, cameras on, no scoring, purely to get the language moving
Twenty minutes: two timed tasks, everyone recording simultaneously
Twenty minutes: three recordings played to the group and scored aloud against the rubric, by the group
Ten minutes: one targeted pronunciation or delivery point, chosen from what the recordings showed
The scoring-out-loud part
Having your recording played and discussed is the feature people most want to skip and the one that moves scores fastest. Not because criticism helps — because scoring other people's answers against the rubric teaches you what the rubric means far quicker than being scored does.
By your fourth session you will be predicting your own band before I say it, and being right. That is the point at which independent practice starts working, and it is why students who stay a full quarter improve and students who attend twice do not.
If you cannot attend live
Every session has an asynchronous equivalent: the same prompts, recorded on your own time, returned with audio feedback from me within two days. Around a third of the lab uses this permanently, usually because of time zones, and their gains are comparable.
Come to one session before subscribing. Speak in it — listening to other people be scored while saying nothing is not a preview of this lab, it is a preview of the wrong version of it.
In this course you will be able to
Deliver all four speaking tasks inside the time limit without running short or being cut off
Plan an independent response in fifteen seconds using a structure you have internalised rather than memorised
Take notes on a ninety-second lecture that are actually usable when you start speaking
Score your own recording against the official rubric and agree with a rater within one band
Speak at an even pace under pressure, which is the most commonly lost easy mark
Recover audibly from a slip instead of restarting the sentence and losing eight seconds
Track your band score across weeks with recorded evidence rather than by feel
Prerequisite
Preparing for the TOEFL iBT, typically targeting 26 or above in speaking
Around B2 English. This is a speaking lab, not a general English course
A working microphone and a room where you can speak aloud for an hour
Available live at 8:30 PM Singapore Time on Mondays, or able to complete the asynchronous task set instead
Two to three hours a week. The subscription bills quarterly and can be cancelled at the end of any quarter
Willingness to hear your own recordings played back to the group, which is uncomfortable exactly twice
Topics covered
The four TOEFL speaking tasks and what each one is actually measuringThe independent task: fifteen seconds to plan, forty-five to deliverBuilding a reusable planning template that does not sound templatedThe integrated tasks: listening, note-taking and reporting under timeNote-taking shorthand for a ninety-second lectureDelivery: pace, volume and the tendency to speed up when nervousPronunciation at the level the rubric cares about — intelligibility, not accentWord stress and sentence stress, and why they matter more than individual soundsIntonation patterns that signal a list, a contrast or a conclusionFilling a pause without a filler wordRecovering from a mistake mid-answer without restartingVocabulary range without reaching for words you cannot pronounce confidentlyGrammatical accuracy under time pressure, and which errors the rubric forgivesReading the rubric as a checklist rather than a mysterySelf-assessment: scoring your own recording honestlyTest-day nerves, and the three things that actually help
