Your tools: listening, recording, typing and dragging

What this lesson teaches

Every task depends on a control: sound, microphone, keyboard or dragging. Practice each one here, on everyday sentences, before it matters.

By the end of the lesson, you can

1. Follow control directions exactly: turn up / turn down, allow access, speak at your normal volume, type the missing letters, drag … into / back to ….
2. Set a comfortable volume, know when audio can be replayed (while learning) and when it plays once (the Check and the test), and fix a blocked start.
3. Pass a microphone check, start speaking the moment the prompt ends, and complete typing and drag-only tile screens, including the extra tile.

What’s inside

This orientation lesson is a brief, three teaching cycles with drills, and a debrief. How every course lesson is built.

Inside this lesson

Sound: the test sound and the Volume slider

Hearing clearly starts with the Hardware Check: play the test sound, then open Volume in the toolbar and move the Output volume slider until the voice is clear and comfortable. The English point is small but easy to reverse: up means more sound and down means less, and with a pronoun the particle goes last (turn it up). Too before an adjective signals a problem to fix, while clear and comfortable mean leave things as they are.

A troubleshooting table matches symptoms to fixes: too quiet, too loud, silence (usually an unplugged headset or a slider at zero), or a Start audio button when the browser has blocked playback. Another table shows where replay is allowed. The test sound, walk-throughs and guided sets can be replayed; a lesson’s Check and the full practice tests play each recording once, so the volume has to be set before they start.

The microphone: allow, check the level, play it back

Recording problems are caught by three checks in order. First choose Allow when the browser asks for the microphone, or change the site setting if you blocked it. Then record the sample line at a normal speaking volume while watching the meter, which reads Too Quiet, Good or Too Loud. Finally play the sample back and listen for clear words, not just for sound.

The lesson stresses one distinction learners often miss: the meter shows what the microphone hears, while the Volume slider only changes what you hear, so a meter problem is never solved with Volume. On the speaking screens there is no preparation time, so you begin as soon as the prompt ends and wait for “Saving your response…” to finish before selecting anything. Every response window in this course is a practice setting, not an official timing.

Typing letters, typing answers, placing tiles

The third cycle contrasts two typing directions. Type the missing letters in Complete the Words means adding only the end of a word whose beginning is already shown, so after fr you type ont, not front. Type your answer means free text in the Email and Discussion boxes, where you can hide or show the word count.

For Build a Sentence the lesson teaches the prepositions of the direction: you move a tile into a blank and take it back to the word list to undo, and remove means take out of the sentence, not delete. Printed words stay fixed, and some items include a tile that fits nowhere, which should be left in the list rather than forced in.

More in Start here

1. How the TOEFL works now
2. Your tools: listening, recording, typing and dragging (this lesson)

For the structure of the test itself, see the TOEFL format guide.