How to prepare for the toefl

I believe that these TOEFL preparation courses respond to three trends within the profession. First, there appears to be a greater recognition on the part of many ESL teachers that student goals must be acknowledged and addressed. For the engineer, the businessperson, the doctor, or the preuniversity student, a satisfactory score on the TOEFL is one of the most immediate goals; for many, without the required score, they cannot continue their professional studies or, obtain certification to practice their professions. They may have Cher language goals as weil, such as leaming to communicate more effectively or improving, their writing, but these goals do not usually exert the same kinds of pressure that the required TOEFL score does.

Second, teachers have recognized and recorded the damaging resuits of test anxiety. We have ail, observed students who were so frightened of failure that they have performed on the TOEFL at a level far below that which their perfor-mance, in class would have indicated. The standardized score just didn't correspond with the score in thebradebook. In addition, teachers have become aware that for some students, the TOEFL represents their first experience in taking a standardized test with a test book and a separate answer sheet or a computer-assisted test. The concepts of working within time limits, marking an answer grid or screen, and guessing to improve a score are often new and confusing to students, and they forfeit valuable points because they must concentrate on unfamiliar procedures instead of on language questions.

Third, teachers have observed the corresponding changes in student proficiency that have
accompanied the evolutionary changes in ESL syllabus design. Since this book was first written, we have moved away from a grammatical syllabus to a notional functional syllabus, and at this writing, there seems to be growing interest in a contentbased syllabus. Vwwed in terms of what has actually happenedîn classrooms, most of us have emphasized the teaching of functions and meaning and de-emphMzed the teaching of forms. As we did so, we noticed with pride the improvement in student fluency and wâh dismay the corresponding loss of accuracy. Som of our best, most fluent students received dmppenting scores on the test that was so important to them.

Through these observations and experiences, teachers have concluded that (1) students need to work toward their own goajs, (2) students need some time to,focus on accuracy as weil as on fluency, and (3) students need an opportunity to practice taking a standardized test in order loi aileviate anxiety and deve4 test strategies. With the introduction of the Computer-Based TOEFL, the opportunity to gain experiencetaking a computerassisted model test has also become important to student confidence and success. In short, more and more teachers have begun to support the inclusion of la TOEFL prepâration course in the ESL curriculum.