Tips n Tricks for TOEFL Takers

Tips n Tricks for TOEFL Takers-the swift ones!


Basically there are 2 kinds of TOEFL takers, those who are already good at English and those who are not, this posting will be most beneficial for the latter group, especially to boost their score in the structure section (because the listening section needs a lot of practice and can not be improved overnight, and the reading section needs more patience than skills).

Here are the tips n tricks:

1. TOEFL is the most famous test to measure English proficiency, so there are so many books out there that you can buy for your preparation. Having a book is a must (well, borrowing it is also OK), choose the one that is published by reputable ELT (English Language Teaching) book publisher, the only problem is usually the whole content of the book is in English, if your native language is not English then it is probably better to buy TOEFL preparation book which is written in your native language.

2. TOEFL materials are just a set of rules, therefore the only key to succeed is by memorizing those rules, as simple as that. You will probably disagree with me now, but let us look at one of the problems in TOEFL below:

If I go to the shop, I ... you a candy.
a. will buy
b. would buy
c. am buying
d. would have bought

The answer to that problem is of course: a. will buy, because the formula is: If + V1, V1
So, whenever there is a problem with similar pattern, you can always refer to the formula.
TOEFL materials are always like that, from year to year, so once again, you just need to memorize the formulas.

3. Don't bother yourselves by memorizing new words and their meaning because there are zillions of words, and if you're lucky you can only memorize around a hundred of them, so there is only a very slim chance that the words you memorized are the words that are tested on the TOEFL. Furthermore, once you memorize the formula, you don't need to memorize the rest, including the vocabs. Just look again on the example from the second point, you may not know the meaning of each and every single of the word, but since you know the formula, you can still answer the problems correctly.

Well, these are the tips and the tricks that my students always find useful, I hope you find it that way too. Have a nice test! ;)