Autumn term means TOEFL
Leave it, it’s autumn
Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias. In a lot of the language academies there are posters advertising TOEFL (rather than tofu), this is one of the more popular English exams for foreigners, in as far as an exam can be called popular. It’s the standard American requirement for non native speakers of English to get into college.
And it’s just a bit tricky.
The reason for that is that you don’t pass or fail, you just get a score. And if you want to do a masters in the US, the college you want to go to can set any requirement they like. A perfect TOEFL score is 120, one of my students needed a 105 to get on his course. That was because he was applying to do pilot training and you don’t want to spend your time learning English when you’re supposed to be learning to fly.
If you get a good score you can be sure that you’ll understand the majority of lectures and college situatuins. This means that the exam proceeds at a fierce pace. Full speed lectures to listen to and answer questions on, difficult, technical texts to read and understand. A speaking section that native speakers would struggle to score perfectly on (for example, read a 200 word passage in 45 seconds, then listen to a part of a lecture on, say, the folk tradition and the song ‘The Briar and the Rose’, then talk about it, answering a specific question (in this case it was: What defines a folk song and what elements of The Briar and The Rose place it within this tradition).
The difficulties of the exam are compounded by some students’ lateness in preparing for the exam, such as: I need a score of 85 and I have the exam in three weeks. It does mean that the lessons sort of plan themselves, and you just do a lot of practice questions, but sometimes you just know that a student is not at the right level and it’s distressing to see them realise it, to see them understand that the masters they wanted to do will have to wait.
Tags: teaching
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