Hello guys!
Thank you! Many of you helped me with all the content present on this website. I just wanna share my experience (that turned out to be great) now that the TOEFL is over for me. How fluently you speak and how good you understand spoken english may vary depending on different factors such as how long you've been improving your english before the TOEFL showed up in your life, but I think there are a few points in the preparation for the test that are common to everybody regardless. And I want to give advice to everyone that is looking for it.
- Writing section: Look for the Jason Renshaw tutorials. Those are great and help you build an essay from the ground. It is amazing how much you can improve your skills from zero with these tutorials, they go from key points/summary to how to add examples and details. It takes some time but this is the only section in which I saw myself improving day after day. And the only section in which I had a 30 on test day. It's worth pointing out that my essay was over 600 words and I still got the maximum score. As long as you are providing details to your examples or enhancing your introduction/conclusion it's ok to extend your essay. Also it's good to take the list from the ETS website with prompts for this section and practise the beginning of the task. I mean writing the outline. You read a prompt, think about it, decide what's your opinion, state it and write 2 or 3 reasons. This should take no more than 5 minutes and you can practise with a lot of different tasks in little time. This way you learn to struggle with twisted essay prompts and get used to develop your outline quicker. It will save you precious time in the test that you can use to provide more examples and details.
- Speaking: Once again the Jason Renshaw tutorials are useful, giving you the basics, telling you for example how to organize the little time given to speak, what things are important and what not. It is really important to prepare this section in advance, because going through the stage of "I open my mouth and nothing comes out of it" can be dramatic if you leave this section for the week before the test. You can be fluent, but if you've never considered speaking of such topics with that little time of preparation it's definitely hard. Not much more to say since I'm just recommending those tutorials from Mr. Renshaw. Don't forget that notetaking is key in this section. In some questions you'll have to speak relating what you read with what you just heard, so taking good and efficient notes will make a difference when it's time to speak. Practise note taking. On youtube you can find many audios for that.
- Listening: As I said, note taking is key. This skill is obviously very important for the listening as well since it's impossible to memorize every detail you hear. Practise the listening, you'll learn eventually to recognize the most important details and to write down while you keep listening.
- Reading: How to improve your reading skills is something I don't know. Some people say that just reading a lot will make you better at it. For this section I just took a quick look at the Official Guide for the TOEFL section where it explains the kind of questions you'll come across with. And then I practised the tests I had on my computer (I used Barron's the most for the reading).
Turns out that in the listening section I got the same score on test day (24) that 2 months before when I did a listening task for the first time. I didn't find the way to improve it but felt somehow that it was OK. But back then I felt completely useless with the speaking and writing sections. As it happened to me it is possible to become very good at those 2 tasks. My final score was 108. So good luck to everybody.
