Yoko joined a TOEFL Course a few days ago and has been working hard ever since. Here is an E-mail, she sent to me today:
Hi Michael,
My name is Yoko, my account name is *******. Thank you for your positive review on my pronunciation test. As I mentioned on the test, the only section I had no problem was Speaking section.I’d like to give you a little more details on my test result. I scored 17 on reading, 16 on listening, 21 on writing, 26 on speaking. 80 total.I need to score over 100 for my graduate admission, there is no minimum requirement on each section.
I ran out of time on reading, so the low score on reading was expected. I was quite shocked at my low listening score as I haven’t faced any issue on listening in my personal/professional life. I noticed listening affected my writing score, because I did well on the second part which is to write on a certain topic with no listening involved, but didn’t do so well on the first part with the listening involved. I could have done even better on speaking if I listened better.
As you suggested, I’ve been listening to NPR, taking notes, learning more vocabulary, and have been doing some listening exercises on Randall’s ESL website.
I can see I’m improving, especially in terms of taking notes. Instead of trying to write down every single details and end up losing some of the key points, I’m able to capture the important points more. However, I still miss the key points when the topic is unfamiliar. For example, I had a hard time on your test 5, ‘physics of flying an airplane’ and test 11 ‘evolution of the sun’ even after listening twice. Is there any way to overcome this challenge?
I scheduled my test in mid June, to make my graduate program due date. I’m hoping to be ready for the test by then.
Any tips would be appreciated.
Yoko
And here is what I said to her:
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