TOEFL

TOEFL is "Test of English as a Foreign Language." People outside north America have to take this test if they want to enter a university in the U.S.  Full score of TOEFL is 120. TOEFL consists of 4 section, reading, listening, speaking and writing. Each section has 30 points. It is needed to get score higher than at least 100 if you want to enter top universities such as Harvard, MIT and so on. My last score was 89. 25 for reading and listening and 18 for speaking and 21 for writing. As you can see, my biggest problem is in speaking section. I think I have a plenty of opportunities to speak English because I have friends who can speak English and I speak with them almost everyday. In addition, I speak with Filipino almost everyday using skype. It is an online English scool called rarejob. My teachers are all very kind and highly-motivated to teach English. All of them speak English very fluently and I think their pronunciation is almost perfect even though English is a second language for them. I don't know how much effort they have made ever and how much effort I have to make from now to acquire same  level of command... As I mentioned, I speak English almost everyday. However, I found that I need a special training for TOEFL because it doesn't examine conversational skill but logical skill. And it is difficult to get this skill without special training. Now I'm thinking of going special school for TOEFL. It seems that they teach how to get high score. Their method is very simple. They give us several templates of answer. What exam taker do is to list key words in preparation time and fill out templates with those key words. It sounds easy even though I doubt how it will be helpful after you start your life in the U.S. I'll definitely post articles about TOEFL in the future.