Duolingo Speaking: The ONLY Strategy You Need in 2025

this is the question I get asked the most from Dual lingual English test takers how do I improve my test score as quickly and as easily as possible and the answer is pretty simple going to tell you right now it's to focus on your production score now you might be asking why my production score and how do I actually improve my production score that's what we're going to talk about together in this video I'm going to show you an example from a real student and show you the stepbystep kind of instructions that I give to

the student to help them first know their current level and weaknesses and also how to improve their score this isn't just like a 10 quick tips and tricks video no this is a indepth process to show you exactly what to do to improve your score and for this video we're going to focus on speaking stick around to the end I'm going to give you a bunch of links to free resources that you can use and also at the end I'll show you the where you can find the next video to help you with writing that

way you can improve your production score with both so let's start with answering that question why production score so you want to focus on your production score which is your speaking and writing responses because you are in control of your production you are in control of of what you say and what you write the reading and listening passages and you know questions are more about what you know right now do you know this vocabulary or not the very first question type on the dualingo English test is just a word do you know this word is

it real or not that's it there's no way for you to really prepare for that there's not really a whole lot of strategy you can do for that you either know the word or you don't and the way you learn more vocabulary is over time and exposure to a lot of different reading listening speaking writing materials but the speaking and writing on the other hand these longer responses you are in control of you dictate what you say and what you write and the vocabulary you use so if you need to improve your score quickly you

need to focus on production because learning more vocabulary takes a lot more time and a lot more exposure so that's why if you need to improve your score very quickly you want to focus on your production the more important question and the more difficult question how do you improve your production well with my student who I'm going to call James in this in this video uh no not James it's a it's a lady so let me say Jane uh Jane is one of my students one of my recent students and I'm going to show you

her speaking response and what I tell her to do to improve but before I do that I ask her two questions the first question is how do do you practice speaking for the det now okay so that's important most people say either they take practice tests or they record themselves speaking maybe hire a teacher have conversations with friends and family or you're immersing yourself in English so I'm going to show you a different way to practice that's going to really lead to Improvement the second question I usually ask is what do you think you need

to improve so if I tell you for your speaking pronunciation intonation fluency GR vocabulary or just kind of D strategy and structure which one do you think you need to improve on to be honest a lot of times people say they need to learn more about the test and templates when really there's usually something more about the way that you speak that you need to improve on so we want to create a speaking habit that's less than 15 minutes to do a day and really simple because right now the problem is that with your speaking

you can't really improve if you have no specific goal in mind if if you have no way to get feedback on your speaking and also you have no way to work on your weaknesses so let's do that together right now the first step is to collect D speaking questions pretty simple you can go to TSD prep.com you can make a free account and you get free practice questions so you want to collect them for speak about the photo speaking sample make a free account get some questions for you to practice what do you do after

that that leads to step number two if is that you want to record yourself practicing just one question a day just one that's it you're going to record your voice probably between 30 seconds to 2 minutes something like that depends on which question type you're practicing with but you record your voice about 1 minute 90 seconds and you're going to analyze that so that's the part that people don't like I know you don't like the sound of your own voice but this is really the only way to improve your speaking is to record your voice

and listen back to it and I'm going to show you how to do that in a smart way in a second I first have to explain why this is so important because speaking just kind of comes and goes right I'm talking right now the words come out and they're gone you go to a supermarket you speak you ask some questions and you go home you go into a taxi you go to a party you use English maybe every day but you don't analyze your speech you don't look at the detail of it because you don't

need to if somebody at the grocery store understands you then it's not a big deal if you have some little grammar mistakes little pronunciation mistakes but on a test those little mistakes matter a lot and so look at this example from uh one of uh my students here Jane so let's listen to the just the first sentence of Jane's response just the first sentence I don't think it's a good idea for a parents buying cell phone to to their children right off the bat in the first sentence you know you there's some things that might

be an issue but one thing I noticed immediately is a spoken grammar mistake so she says I don't think it's a good idea for parents buying cell phone to their children it should be I don't think it's a good idea for parents to buy so an infinitive instead of a jiren there to buy cell phones for their children and also cell phones should have an S as well now if we were speaking me and her together you know I probably wouldn't tell her that because it's not that important I understand what she's saying it's not

a big deal for communication everyday life but on the test this is a big deal so we need to record our voice so you can analyze it very closely you might be saying to yourself yeah but Josh I'm not a teacher I don't know what's good and bad you know you can say that right now it sounds easy but I don't know how to do that I don't know how to check if I'm making mistakes or not all right well let me show you how to do that right now with Elsa speech analyzer this site

is an amazing resource you can make an account for free they do not sponsor this video I just love the website and I think it's very helpful you get 30 minutes of free feedback and even if you made an account it's like 30 bucks a month or something for unlimited feedback on your speaking so this is totally changing the way that English language Learners learn like you so let me show you how to use this tool but before I do there are two things that you should do before you record and upload your response here

the first thing is that before you speak you should set a goal I know that's annoying and it's kind of hard to do which is why I have a goals list here for every section of the Dual lingual English test you can use it just for speaking here but I'll put a link in the description below it's totally free and you can use that to help you set goals like let's say for example you're speaking too slow and you want to speak faster yesterday your response you had 100 words in 60 seconds today you want

to try to say 105 words in 60 seconds or maybe your vocabulary is a little limited you're saying I like a lot today you're trying you're going to Instead try to say I really enjoy for example right so you have the speaking questions you set a goal you record your voice and now I want you to transcribe your voice is to write down what you hear this will give you a much more intimate experience with your speaking you'll be able to really notice your strengths and weaknesses and you'll notice habits that you have that you

never noticed before this will be uncomfortable at first but if you want to improve your speaking and get your best possible score I really encourage you to not just record your voice but write down what you hear transcribe it that'll take a couple minutes only for the this one just 60 seconds 90 seconds that's it just this one response listen and transcribe it'll take about 3 4 minutes to do now after that you upload your response to Elsa speech analyzer and this really is where the magic happens now also by the way if you hate

transcribing your response they will transcribe it for you you can check out your transcription there as well so you can skip that step but I I encourage people to do it you get a score here out of 100 this is not for dual lingo Elsa is an independent company they don't sponsor this video I just really like the platform and I think it's really helpful they don't give you a score estimate for dual lingo but they do give you one for IELTS for other tests too but dual lingo has a page and I'm going to

link to it in the description that shows you a conversion chart between the your I speaking score and your dual lingual English test speaking score and you can use that to help you decide uh what score you would get for this student believe this is something like a 110 or 115 on Dual lingo besides that score she gets a score for her pronunciation her intonation her fluency her grammar and vocabulary now for this student her goal before she started speaking was to improve her vocabulary was to try to use some difficult vocabulary she wanted to

use three different words and let me show you what they are she wanted to use the words in enticing Captivate and sedentary and she got chances to actually use them in her response she took a little bit more time to prepare than she would on test day but that's okay since she's trying to practice and improve one thing to keep in mind when you're practicing on Elsa is that you don't have to follow the test conditions it doesn't have to be exactly like the test but you definitely don't want to record your voice over and

over again and then say Oh I did it this is my 10th time and I got a perf score I no it doesn't that's not a good practice but if your goal is like Jane here take a minute to think okay I'm going to use the word enticing I'm going to try to use Captivate so you can think about that before you start speaking but really try to follow the test conditions for you to get an accurate score also keep in mind that the score is not perfect you know like the I would say it's

like plus or minus 10 or 15 points it's think of your score as like a range like if you got a 110 it's like your score is between 100 than 120 it's about that that range now if I look here and I see my score I see that my vocabulary score is 84 and my grammar is 42 you know so that clearly there's a lot of problems with my grammar uh fluency and intonation are you know in the middle so this is the next step is to work on your mistakes work on your weaknesses so

with Jane here she had some issues here but there was but they give her a rephrasing it shows her how to write this sentence the these sentences this passage better so what she can do here is that she can look in this and rewrite her response and record it again now you might be thinking hey but you can't do that on the test how that's not helpful because it's not like the test again we're working on improving your speaking and you do that by looking at your example finding some mistakes and finding ideas to help

you improve so here I encourage you to rewrite your response after you see some of your issues and so what she's going to do is that you're going to rewrite the response and record it again focusing on trying to make it sound cleaner reducing the US and ums trying to say more words in less time now you'll notice that I didn't talk about intonation fluency grammar and vocabulary because I don't want you to focus too much on all of the mistakes you don't want to try to make this perfect you want to focus on one

or two things that you need to do better for this student after she records her response sets a goal achieves that goal or tries to achieve that goal gets feedback rewrites her response tries to make it a little bit better record the same response again making it better nicer cleaner now she can think what should I do tomorrow and one thing that I would recommend for Jane to do tomorrow is to work on her grammar she had a lot of issues with grammar so we need to help her improve on that you can click to

see details here and they will highlight some of the issues with grammar in your uh transcript here and you can rewrite your response based on the feedback also what I did here for Jane is that I showed all of the grammar mistakes that she had that had to do with cell phones she kept saying cell phone cell phone when she should have been saying cell phones with an S so that's what she should work on tomorrow when talking about a topic in general for example you're going to talk about sharks usually there's an S at

the end so she should work on that tomorrow so that is the step-by-step process so you collect all the speaking questions that you need to practice you set a goal you practice one question a day you transcribe that response you get feedback on that respon response you focus on the weaknesses and try to improve it and make it better and then you think about what you want to do tomorrow to make yourself better so not your typical tips and tricks strategies but I hope you found this helpful let me know if you did I'm going

to make another video for writing as well because a lot of students have questions about writing I will put a link somewhere down here to that and I'll release that soon all right thank you guys for watching I appreciate your support my name is teacher Josh from TST prep and I will see you next time