TOEFL

Hola Amigos! Continuing with the previous edition of College Watch, this edition will cover TOEFL. An acronym of “Test of English as a Foreign Language”, it is an important criterion through which foreign universities test a person’s skill in English. More than 10,000 colleges, agencies and other institutions in over 130 countries accept TOEFL scores.

What is it?

TOEFL is a standardized test to measure the English language ability of non-native speakers wishing to enroll in English-speaking universities. The test is accepted by many English-speaking academic and professional institutions. TOEFL is one of the two major English-language tests in the world, the other being the IELTS. It is conducted and administered by ETS (Educational Testing Service), the same organization that conducts GRE. The scores of TOEFL are valid for two years.

Internet-based test (iBT):

The TOEFL lasts a total of 3.5 hours and includes four sections: Reading, Listening, Speaking, and Writing. For each section, you’ll receive a score of 0–30. These scores are then added together, meaning your total TOEFL score will be from 0–120.

Let’s take a look at the different sections:

1. Reading — The ability to translate written symbols into sound!

The Reading section consists of questions on 3–5 passages, each approximately 700 words in length and each contains 12–14 questions. The passages are on academic topics and prior knowledge about them is not required to answer the questions. The passages require understanding of rhetorical functions such as cause-effect, compare-contrast and argumentation. The questions are usually about the main ideas, details, inferences and vocabulary. The time given for this section is 60–80 minutes.

2. Listening — A skill that underpins all human communication!

The Listening section consists of questions on six passages, each 3–5 minutes in length. These passages include two student conversations and four academic lectures or discussions. Each conversation and lecture passage is heard only once and the test taker is allowed to take notes. The questions based on them are meant to measure the ability to understand main ideas, important details, implications, relationships between ideas, organization of information, speaker purpose and speaker attitude. The time given for this section is 60–90 minutes following which there is a mandatory break of 10 minutes.

3. Speaking — The act of making vocal sounds to express thoughts and feelings!

The Speaking section consists of six tasks. The test-takers read a short passage, listen to an academic course lecture or a conversation about campus life and answer a question by combining appropriate information from the text and the talk. They are tested on their ability to appropriately synthesize and effectively convey information from the reading and listening material. The responses are digitally recorded, and are sent to ETS’s Online Scoring Network (OSN). The time duration is 20 minutes.

4. Writing — A skill that helps you to create a context in which others can think!

The Writing section measures a test taker’s ability to write in an academic setting and consists of two tasks: In the first one, test-takers read a passage on an academic topic and then listen to a speaker discuss it. The test-taker then writes a summary about the important points in the listening passage and explains how these relate to the key points of the reading passage. In the second task, the test-taker must write an essay that states their opinion or choice, and then explain it, rather than simply listing personal preferences or choices. The time duration for this last section is 50 minutes.

TOEFL Scores — Where to use them?

Most colleges use TOEFL scores as only one factor in their admission process, with a college or program within a college often setting a minimum TOEFL score required. The minimum TOEFL iBT scores range from 61 (Bowling Green State University) to 111 (University of Oxford).

GRE or TOEFL?

The GRE is a graduate school entrance exam while the TOEFL is a test of your English language skills. Schools want to see GRE scores to make sure you can handle graduate-level coursework, and they want to see TOEFL scores to make sure your English skills are strong enough to do well at an English-speaking school. Looking at the other differences, GRE doesn’t test the speaking and listening skills and instead tests the Quantitative ability and TOEFL has easier Reading and Writing Sections than GRE. One could choose between these two depending on the requirements listed by the institute.