Structuring
Some teachers have suggested that each review section in this book be used for a separate class; they are team teaching a TOEFL course. Other teachers direct their students to the language laboratory for independent study in listening comprehension three times a week, checking on progress throughout the term; assign reading and vocabulary study for homework; and spend class time on structure and writing. Still other teachers develop individual study plans for each student based on previous TOEFL part scores. Students with high listening and low reading scores concentrate their efforts in reading labs, while students with low listening and high reading scores spend time in listening labs.
Materials and Activities
Listening. Studies in distributive practice have convinced teachers of listening comprehension that a little practice every day for a few months is more valuable than a lot of practice concentrated in a shorter time. In addition, many teachers like to use two kinds of listening practice- intensive and extensive. Intensive practice consists of listening to problems like those in the review of listening in this book. By so doing, the student progresses from short conversations through longer conversations to mini-talks, gaining experience in listening to simulations of the TOEFL examination. Extensive practice consists of watching a daytime drama on television, listening to a local radio program, or auditing a class. Creative teachers everywhere have developed strategies for checking student progress such as requiring a summary of the plot or a prediction of what will happen the following day on the drama; a one-sentence explanation of the radio program, as well as the name of the speaker, sponsor of the program, and two details; a copy of student notes from the audited class.
Speaking. One of the best ways to support students who are fearful of speaking is to address the issue of confidence. Developing a positive attitude toward the speaking tasks is a key to success on this section of the TOEFL. Another important strategy is to make 60-second telephone assignments. The TOEFL Academic Speaking Test (TAST), which is a preliminary version of the Speaking Section on the Next Generation TOEFL, is currently administered by telephone. To prepare our students for this new experience, some of us are experimenting with phonein speaking practice by using telephone answering machines to record our students when they call. In this way, the students can become accustomed to the telephone tasks and we can provide more realistic feedback for them.
Structure. Of course, the focus in a review of structure for the TOEFL will be on form. It is form that is tested on the TOEFL. It is assumed that students have studied grammar prior to reviewing for the TOEFL, and that they are relatively fluent. The purpose of a TOEFL review then is to improve accuracy. Because accuracy is directly related to TOEFL scores and because the scores are tied to student goals, this type of review motivates students to pay attention to detail that would not usually be of much interest to them. Among ESL teachers, the debate rages on about whether students should ever see errors in grammar. But many teachers have recognized the fact that stucfents do see errors all the time, not only in the distractors that are used on standardized tests like the TOEFL and teacher-made tests like the multiple-choice midterms in their grammar classes, but also in their own writing.
They argue that students must be able to recognize errors, learn to read for them, and correct them. The student preparing for the TOEFL will be required not only to recognize correct answers but also to eliminate incorrect answers, or distractors, as possibilities. The review of structure in this book supports recognition by alerting students to avoid certain common distractors. Many excellent teachers take this one step further by using student compositions to create personal TOEFL tests. By underlining four words or phrases in selected sentences, one phrase of which contains an incorrect structure, teachers encourage students to reread their writing. It has proven to be a helpful transitional technique for students who need to learn how to edit their own compositions.
Reading. One of the problems in a TOEFL preparation course is that of directing vocabulary study. Generally, teachers feel that encouraging students to collect words and develop their own word lists is the best solution to the problem of helping students who will be faced with the dilemma of responding to words from a possible vocabulary pool of thousands of words that may appear in context in the reading section. In this way, they will increase their vocabularies in an ordered and productive way, thereby benefiting even if none of their new words appears on the test that they take.
Activities that support learning vocabulary in context are also helpful. In this edition, a Glossary of Campus Vocabulary supports comprehension of listening as well as of reading items that are, for the most part, campus based. In order to improve reading, students need extensive practice in reading a variety of material, including newspapers and magazines as well as short excerpts from textbooks. In addition, students need to check their comprehension and time themselves carefully.
It is also necessary for students who are preparing for the Computer-Based TOEFL to practice reading from a computer screen. The skill of scrolling through text is different from the skill of reading a page in a book. To succeed on the TOEFL and after the TOEFL, students must develop new reading strategies for texts on screens. An English encyclopedia on CD-ROM is an inexpensive way to provide students with a huge amount of reading material from all the nonfiction content areas tested on the TOEFL. By reading on screen, students gain not only reading comprehension skills but also computer confidence. Again, it is well to advise students of the advantages of distributed practice. They should be made aware that it is better to read two passages every day for five days than to read ten passages in one lab period.
Writing. There are many excellent ESL textbooks to help students improve their writing. Because TOEFL topics include opinion, persuasion, and argument, some teachers tend to emphasize these types of topics in composition classes. The extensive list of writing topics published in the Information Bulletin for the Computer-Based TOEFL and listed on the TOEFL web site offers teachers an opportunity to use actual TOEFL topics in class. In order to help students organize their thoughts, the topics can be used as conversation starters for class discussion. In this way, students will have thought about the topics and will have formed an opinion before they are presented with the writing task on the TOEFL.
It is also a good idea to time some of the essays that students write in class so that they can become accustomed to completing their work within thirty minutes. Although teachers need to develop grading systems that make sense for their teaching situations, the scoring guide that is used for the essay on the TOEFL is general enough to be adapted for at least some of the assignments in an ESL composition class. By using the guide, teachers can inform students of their progress as it relates to the scores that they can expect to receive on the essay they will write for the TOEFL.
Staying Current
So many changes have been made in the design and content of the TOEFL over the years that one of the greatest challenges for teachers is to remain current and to help our students prepare for the format that they will see when they take the TOEFL. Now there are three TOEFL formats- the Paper-Based TOEFL, the Computer- Based TOEFL, and the Next Generation TOEFL--each of which requires slightly different preparation. In addition to the explanations and examples of each format that are provided in this book, the official TOEFL web site is a good resource for the most recent changes. Refer often to updates at www.toefl.org.
Networking with ESL Teachers
One of the many rewards of writing is the opportunity that it creates to exchange ideas with so many talented colleagues. At conferences, I have met ESL teachers who use or have used one of the previous editions of this book; through my publisher, I have received letters from students and teachers from fifty-two nations. This preface and many of the revisions in this new edition were included because of comments and suggestions from those conversations and letters.
Read More : Organization of a TOEFL Preparation Course
