After joining an Online TOEFL Course called “The 7-Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT,” Tommy knew exactly what his weaknesses were, so he focused on the speaking and writing sections of his course. In fact, founder, owner, and materials writer for his new course suggested that he follow a 60-Day TOEFL Study Plan exclusively dedicated to speaking and writing. Heck, how hard could it be to improve in those two areas of his English proficiency?
As Tommy started to work on his speaking lessons, he followed a three-prong attack: 1) He took a pronunciation pre-test in order to have his intelligibility problems diagnosed by a MA-TESL educated language specialist, after which he studied specific lessons designed to help him speak more clearly; 2) he began studying independent and integrated speaking lessons so that he could learn how to coherently organize and develop his responses; and 3) he started posting independent and integrated speaking responses Online at the Voxopop Discussion Group called “The 7-Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT,” after which a MA-TESOL TOEFL iBT speaking specialist would listen to and score his responses in the following areas: delivery, language use, and topic development. Little by little Tommy’s strategies began to pay off, for he was improving in his overall pronunciation and academic speaking proficiency. But it was hard work, Tommy noticed, to make progress.
Then, on the days when Tommy was not studying TOEFL speaking, he concentrated on solving his writing problems. To do this, he had four strategies: 1) He began improving his vocabulary proficiency by learning 1,700 TOEFL words in his new course; 2) he scheduled time each week focusing on TOEFL Grammar Lesson 7, which included 1000’s of editing exercises designed to help him spot common errors in writing and to help him learn to use a combination of basic and more complex sentence structures in his writing; 3) he started studying the independent and integrated writing lessons so he could learn how to organize and develop high-scoring responses; 4) and then he began completing independent and integrated writing practice tests so that he could measure his progress. Practice makes perfect, right? Like improving his speaking, Tommy also noticed that it took a lot of effort to make progress, but he WAS making progress.
Finally, after following his TOEFL Writing and Speaking 60-Day Study Guide, Tommy decided to take the TOEFL exam and boy was he excited when he got back his scores: (109) R=27, L=27, S=28, W=27. It was a difficult 60 days of intensive study, but reaching his TOEFL target scores made it worthwhile. Now he could realize his dream of becoming a pharmacist in the United States.