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for listening part i liked Longman Preparation Course for the TOEFL. don't forget to get the audio cds. Longman has easy passages. it will help you to come up with your own strategy. good learning tool. Do the practice exams in Barrons and see if you made anhy progress

jason's website: [ TOEFL iBT ] Renshaw Internet School of English look under iBT Speaking Tips

i also found the actual reading test questions to be easier than kaplan.

Come up with your own set of abbreviations. this way you can spend less time in taking notes. it will help you in switching between listening and taking notes. i don't know if it will help you or not, but i came up with the new abbreviations when listening to a lecture or conv. if i felt that a word or phrase is being used frequently, i would use the first letter only. get some test prep books. stay focused. Don't go to misc websites unless you have a lot of time before your exam.

i sent you a pm with my response to q1. for integrated part, i was speaking from my notes. So, i don't remember much. if you share your sample responses, i can give you my comments. i am not an expert, but i dont mind giving you my 2 cents :)

I don't know the weightage given to grammar. But i think grammar isn't very imp. it is ok if you make minor mistakes and have a few false starts. The most important thing is to be relaxed. as long as the grader can understand you response, i think grmr mistakes, accent, etc shouldn't matter much. I have typical Indian accent. I paid attn to speaking clearly. Remember the grader has to understand what i am trying to say, so i didnt speak too fast :) whenever possible i wrote phrases instead of just words esp if it is suppose to be the beginning of a para to overcome this problem that i had: if i wrote only words, it was taking me a few seconds to form sentences which resulted in big pauses. i used 'although, on the other hand, because, however, ..'. For Q2, i used the following template for two reasons. 20-30 sec 15-20 sec i gave more time for reason one because i was not sure if i will have enuf stuff for reason 2. just to be on safe side. initially after reason1, i would go blank before starting reason 2. this is one place where it helped me to write the starting phrase for reason 2. for q3: Step 1: Summarize reading passage talks about .... addl sentence(s) [10sec] Step 2: paraphrase the info from the conversation which is pertinent to the change or the announcement. Be sure to include the man/woman's reaction and the reason he or she gives. Jason stresses that more time should be given to reasons, but i didn't find enough material in the conversation and we are not suppose to give our own reasons. So, i just paraphrased the conversation which by default includes reaction and reasons. personally, i felt this to be the easiest qstn. we don't have to come up with stuff. just report back what you have heard and the content is non-academic. q4 is tough because it contains academic concepts. plus we are suppose to summarize and integrate passage and lecture. During prep time look at your notes and identify main points. this will help you to organize the response. template for response: 10 sec step 1. paraphrase the material from the lecture. step 2. integrate by adding a sentence saying Don't restate anything from reading passage. it will eat away your time. repeat step1 and step2

congrats!! 105 wow :tup: the places i am applying to ask for 80+ Yes, i forgot to mention about the noise factor. I think it is better to take a few practice tests in a noisy env (like cafe). we also didn't have any dividers. i can listen to all the conversations(of about 20 test takers) that were going on. i think an essay with 350 words can easily fetch you close to 30 points as long as it is cohesive w/ minor grmr/splg mistakes. having 600 wrds is gr8, but then you are prone to committing more errors :(

Got my scores 114: 30R, 30L, 26S, 28W prep time: 4 weeks (speaking 3 days) I think you have to find a strategy and learning material that works best for you. Here are my comments: I found buying the test material to be very confusing because every publication has so many variations of the material that they sell. Before buying any book online, go to pubs website and find out how many versions they have. No matter which prep book you buy make sure that you get the title "with audio cds" and not just "with cd". Studied: Kaplan(Full), barrons(7 Tests), mastering(S,W), Longmann(L), ets(Nothing) and barrons sample essays. I read kaplan cover to cover. It has some good tips for all sections. I took Kaplan and Barrons practice tests. Listening: Longmann's listening is good for practice. I found it to be very easy, but it helped me in developing notes taking strategy(it proved to be useful even during the integreted Qs in speaking section). I think Barrons listening was very close to the real test. Speaking: I haven't found any book that is useful. Listen to jason's advice (video on his website) for all questions then modify it to whatever works for you. For Q1, Q2, and Q5 I followed his instructions. Q1: pick a few qualities and examples to support them about ppl, place and event. jason has quite a few samples Q2: practice a few toefl writing topics about "you agree or disagree" statements. q3-q6 focus on how well you summarize and para phrase info. for q4 and q6 i wrote down as much as possible while listening. then during the prep time, i just placed a tick mark next to the main points. Remember, you have very little time to speak. so, you can't speak about every thing. Again, focus on summarizing skills. Writing: barrons sample essays will give you a lot of ideas. kaplan has some very good tips on writing a cohesive essay. mastering skills has 20 odd essays (with only 3 paras -- on real exam you have to write 5 paras 300+ words). try to identify COMMON spelling and grammatical mistakes that you make during practice. The text editor in exam has a word count feature. i think ets should wake up and add a spell checker also.