How to Prepare for TOEFL Testing: Listening and Speaking

Preparing for that TOEFL exam means the student has to have some preparation in knowing some key phrases before he applies for the test. I have told the student that if he doesn’t know the present perfect he may get by the test but wrong syntax and wring information may make part of an answer that was supposed to be in the present tense and not the past.

Today there are many competitive books out on the market, including Longmans and ETS editions all wanting a share of the TOEFL market, they allow the student to become familiar with a lesson plan so that he can learn the language in its four parts: spoken, read, listened and written. I have had the opportunity to attend an ETS workshop and brush up on methodology and it comes down to several facts. The student has to follow the instructions that he is given according to the prompts he sees on the pop-up screen and then he has to answer the question to the best of his ability.

Obviously a person who organized his thoughts into a coherent whole with an introductory sentence and a conclusion will have a better score than one who has disjointed sentences. If the person has some sense of giving an answer and has backed up his answer with a reference to the written text after hearing something orally than he has a good chance of getting a score that will fall in the midrange.

Often a student is docked marks if he defends his argument with one point instead of a required two. He is also often penalized if he cannot formulate sentences on his own but reiterates phrases from the text as though he were speaking on his own. There might be a cultural basis for this, in the Chinese culture much emphasis has been on memorization, but memorization is as we all know not the key to individual expressiveness.

Students will often have difficulty remembering what the required information is being asked. On these tests he can often go back and forth from the text questions to the text and check to see if he is on the right track. Another fallback is that the student might expect to remember details without taking notes and he should get used to taking these especially if he is listening to a lecture. Notes can be taken for conversations as well but are more difficult to take.

Current TOEFL tests involve conversations that are longer than before and can be more challenging because the speaker might digress from his main topic. Earlier tests had shorter texts, I was told and there was less digression, ie. the speaker stuck to his point. Since real life conversation involves some digression, that was the reason for remodeling the exam, I was informed.

Students should be prepared to answer question not only on what is being asked directly, or what is the supporting information for a argument, he should also be prepared to answer what was being inferred in a conversation. So there may be a moment where the CD may play a discourse between a student and an academic adviser and the latter gets rhetorical over what the student says. The language learner has to know how to interpret that rhetorical statement.

Teachers can afford to be generous with the language learned if they hear that he is able to piece information on his own, uses good transitional statements, speaks in an orderly fashion and can then judge if he merits a higher score if his vocabulary is more complex or if the student has bothered to go into some detail to back his answers.Obviously if the students answers the question in his native language is going to be eligible for a zero score on that question, because no effort is being shown to speak in English.

If the new speaker answers in some English which is unrelated to the information that is solicited he is also a candidate for a low score but the specific score all depends on the way he presents his information.