You listen to a TOEFL audio track and suddenly realize you missed a phrase or sentence, maybe an important one. Your mind may have wandered, or the speaker may have spoken a little too quickly.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t feel bad. Even native English speakers can let their minds wander, or simply fail to hear something. You\u2019ve missed something you heard before, and you\u2019ll miss something again in the future. Maybe you won\u2019t catch everything that\u2019s said to you in an English-language conversation. After you pass the TOEFL, you\u2019ll definitely miss some of what you hear during lectures on an American campus. But you\u2019ll want to make sure you miss as few words as possible when you take the TOEFL itself.<\/p>\n
The good news is that the speech you hear on the TOEFL is usually slower than English speech in other settings. Build your skills at listening to normally paced English speech, and TOEFL listening will be easier in comparison.<\/p>\n
Magoosh’s top TOEFL Listening tips and tricks<\/a> post has some strategies for maintaining focus in this section. But it is also good to challenge yourself and try to comprehend English speech that is faster<\/em> than usual. One place where you\u2019ll hear a lot of \u201cfast talkers\u201d is in the movies. In movies, the characters will say certain things very quickly. These lines are usually said during an especially exciting, interesting or funny part of the movie. Fast, clever pieces of speech like this are called \u201cone-liners.\u201d Just as you are motivated not to miss the important stuff in TOEFL Listening, you won\u2019t want to miss these one-liners. Often they are the most important things to listen for in a movie scene. The movie may be less enjoyable if you don\u2019t understand what you heard. Watch and listen a collection of American movie one-liners (video below). You can check your comprehension by reading a PDF transcript of the one-liners here: One Liners Worksheet<\/a>. The video contains 18 movie clips. The transcript is numbered by clip. Enjoy!<\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\nPractice activity:<\/h2>\n