Students always want to improve their English competencies for the speaking and writing sections of the TOEFL iBT. Many times students do not know how to approach these sections effectively thus resulting in them asking what useful tips they can take to score higher. Have you been in this situation? Well in Michael’s Online TOEFL Course: “The 7 Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT,” he has composed some useful tips that he has given to his students over the years in order to help during the speaking and writing sections of the exam.
For the speaking section of the TOEFL iBT, Michael emphasizes practice/review, practice/review, and practice/review. This drill helps students build their speaking inaccuracies and proficiencies. You will fumble in the beginning, but ultimately achieve the desired fluency with his: pronunciation lessons, practice tests, and exercises. In addition, Michael puts emphases on correct pronunciation which can largely affect a student’s score; by following his pronunciation section, you can target and improve your pronunciation weaknesses and build extensive practice with vowel and consonants sounds and instruction in stress, intonation, and pausing.
Furthermore from experience, Michael also knows the presence of umms and ahhs (pausing and hesitation) is also one of the main factors that can hold a student’s score below 26 or 24. By eliminating these flaws and following Michael’s speaking lessons, practice tests, exercises, and Voxopop Discussion Group feedback responses; students have the potential to score more than 26 or 24. Moreover, by following Michael’s speaking sections, students build competent speaking skills such as: decoding the speaking task, organizing a coherent response including a topic statement, delivering rich details in the body of the speech, and ending with a conclusion.
For the writing section of the TOEFL iBT, Michael emphasizes how it is important to target and improve your writing weaknesses and evaluate your grammar competencies. If you write a response comprised of at least 450-500 words in an independent writing task, then graders can compromise for some of the grammatical and spelling mistakes; even though the ETS requirement is writing lower than 350 words. But if you write a 350 words essay, then you have to play an error less game, which is difficult. For your integrated responses, there will always be a reading and listening passage contradicting with each other. Both will contain 3 points of contradiction. You will have to summarize each of them one by one while making sure to list each of the main points. Failure to do so can result in an integrated writing score below 20. In this situation, it is helpful to follow a sequencing method explained by Michael.
Furthermore, by following Michael’s: writing lessons, practice tests, exercises, and feedback by an iBT writing specialist; students can improve their writing weaknesses by learning: basic and advanced sentence structures, verb tenses, word forms, word choice, parallel structures, and so on in his grammar section. In addition, with Michael’s writing section students gain competence in independent and integrated writing skills such as: decoding the writing task, organizing a coherent response, writing detailed developmental paragraphs, and ending the essay with a conclusion.
All in all, with effective lessons! If you would like to better your English with Michael’s service consider joining and take the time to build the academic skills needed to perform optimally during your next TOEFL exam.