Jan, who scored 116/120, has some advice for those of you who are taking this TOEFL course.

The 7- Step System TOEFL Course, located at http://bettertoeflscores .com, has an accompanying You Tube channel so its subscribers can post comments after watching videos by founder and materials writer Michael Buckhoff. Two days ago, a You Tube user posted comments about her experience with taking the TOEFL iBT.

A citizen of Romania, Jan took the TOEFL exam last year and scored 116/120 with little or no preparation for the speaking or writing sections. She did not prepare very much for the listening or reading sections either. However, a couple of weeks before the exam, she prepared for the test by learning the format of the test.  “How is it possible, you wonder,  “that someone with little or no TOEFL preparation can score so high on the exam?”

It is possible for someone to score high like Jan. Over a period of about two years, Michael has interviewed more than a dozen test-takers, all of whom scored higher than 100 on the TOEFL iBT.  During each interview, Michael extensively questioned the interviewee about his or her language background. He found two common variables among all the test takers: that they had extensively used English over a long period of time and that they had not studied TOEFL for more than a few weeks.

In regards to the first variable, these 100+ TOEFLers spent many years reading, speaking, and listening to spoken English.  In a lot of cases, not only did these students read, they spent years readings all sorts of materials: magazines, newspapers, and fictional and nonfictional novels.  Most likely before taking the TOEFL exam, they had already read at least 10,000 pages of English. Likewise, these TOEFLers spent hundreds and hundreds of hours speaking and listening to English.  These interviewees spoke fluently with a barely detectable accent and had good control of their grammar and language use.  In addition. they could understand spoken and academic English almost as proficiently as their own language.

With the second variable, since these students already had such a high proficiency of English before taking the TOEFL iBT, they only needed a few weeks, as Jan said to be “prepared on the format of the test.”  But she also said, and this will be the last part of this post, that “IT IS VERY VERY IMPORTANT to know what is coming next in the test, and very very important to know EXACTLY how you need to answer. EXACTLY how you should start and finish your answer.”
This article was written by Michael Buckhoff–co-founder and materials writer for Better TOEFL Scores and The 7-Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT, Composition and Linguistics Professor, TOEFL Specialist, ESL Master Instructor, and Placement and Testing Coordinator for California State University, San Bernardino.Follow more posts and videos from Michael at Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube.

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