We now have new TOEFL materials! To make sure there aren’t too many surprises for our tutors, this post will go over the basics of the TOEFL, the structure of these lessons, and plenty of tips for teaching TOEFL lessons like a pro!

What is TOEFL? And What’s “iBT”?

TOEFL stands for “Test of English as a Foreign Language.” It’s a popular test that students take if they want to enroll in a university or graduate school in an English-speaking country (or even in France and Germany).

TOEFL assesses how prepared students are for university life by testing how well they can deal with common real-life scenarios, such as reading textbook passages or discussing homework with other students.

The “iBT” that you’ll often see after TOEFL stands for "internet-based test," the primary form of the test these days — not the computer-based test or the paper test.

About The Materials

Our new TOEFL materials are called Decoding the TOEFL IBT Actual Test and they can be found at the bottom of our Materials page:

Like most of our other test prep materials, our TOEFL materials cover the speaking section of the exam. There are two types of tasks in the speaking section:

1. Independent Speaking Tasks have students express their opinions on some topic (e.g. “the most memorable person in your life” or “the effects video games have on teenagers”)
2. Integrated Speaking Tasks have students first read a passage and/or listen to an audio file (e.g. a lecture or conversation), and then talk about what they read and/or heard.

As of August 2019, the speaking section has four tasks: one Independent Speaking Task and three Integrated Speaking Tasks. Our new TOEFL materials follow this new format. 

In addition, unlike our previous materials, which were only open to tutors who had a TOEFL tag, our new materials are available to all tutors.

Teaching Tips

Each lesson simulates an actual TOEFL speaking test with the following tasks:

1. Speaking Task
2. Reading, Listening (Conversation) & Speaking Task 
3. Reading, Listening (Lecture) & Speaking Task
4. Listening (Lecture) & Speaking Task

Besides correcting mistakes and making sure the student answers all parts of a question, you’ll want to focus your feedback on making the student sound more “college-level.” Here are some general tips to that end:

• Grammar: Students should be able to form longer and more complex sentences using grammatical structures such as conditionals, passive voice, reported speech, and the subjunctive. 
• Vocabulary: There’s no need to suggest using fancy vocabulary, but we definitely want to help students use more advanced language. For example, if your student says “video games are good for kids” in response to a question, you don’t need to suggest “video games have a beneficial impact on children,” but you probably do want to suggest “video games have a positive effect on children.”
• Organization: Does the student clearly state their opinion first before providing reasons and examples? Does the student end with a conclusion? Do the students’ ideas flow naturally? Did they use linking words like “first,” “second,” “therefore,” “further,” and “lastly”?

And finally, since this is a test, there is some test-specific feedback we want to provide. For example:

• In tasks 2 and 3, did the student mention both the listening and reading passages in their response? (Sometimes students forget to mention one of them!) 
• Did the student include any statistics from the passages into their response? (After all, those statistics aren’t there for no reason!)

If any of this sounds confusing, we promise it’ll be clearer once you start teaching the lessons and are able to compare the student’s response with the sample responses. If you want to be even more prepared, check out the responses in the sample TOEFL lessons.

Finally, it definitely helps to have a timer. We find that it’s difficult to listen to the student while keeping track of time, especially if you’re also taking notes on their response.

👋 That’s it for now!

We hope this has given you a general idea of the TOEFL speaking test and how to teach with our newest series like a pro. If you encounter any issues or have any suggestions for this series, feel free to contact Tutor Support. In the meantime, happy tutoring!