Practice For Step 3 back to top

 Practice with focus. Imagine yourself in the exam center. Try the question under exam conditions and do your best. I know it can be tough, but don't give yourself extra time and don't use any writing program that automatically checks your spelling or your grammar: this very bad for you skill development and won't help you improve as quickly as you can, which means we might have to take the test a few times to get the score we need.  Save your essay so that you can revisit it and edit it in the future. Save multiple versions so that you can note your progress. What that means is: save your 1st try as a document, then your revision as another, and so on. In this way, you'll see multiple versions of your essays and notice how you're improving. Good luck!   

For timing yourself: Stopwatch 

Question 1 back to top

 Reading time: 3 minutes 

Easter Island Approximately 500 years ago, the flourishing society of Easter Island suffered a steep decline in population. Many theories have surfaced explaining how this could have happened to such a thriving culture. Within this small, isolated island in the Pacific Ocean, researchers have uncovered archaeological evidence that clearly indicates one theory for the decimation of the Easter Islanders above all others: invaders. 

First, the disappearance of nearly every tree on this Island points to the kind of environmental destruction that could only result from foreign incursions. Researchers discovered that this land now devoid of trees was once covered with palms. Biological evidence indicates an abundance of palm for centuries until about 500 years ago, the time when the population nearly vanished. Only invaders could have brought about that kind of destruction all at once. Another key piece of support lies in the archeological discovery of spear tips that appeared at around the same time as the near destruction of the Islanders. These spear tips show beyond any doubt that there was conflict and warfare on the island best explained by the onslaught of invaders. In addition to these war implements, skeletons from that time have been examined and show the kind of deformation that results only from combat. Last, the appearance of a new religion provides more support. Special dating methods used by archeologists determined that "birdman" statues surfaced at the same time as the dramatic shift in population. As history proves time and time again, when an invading force occupies a new territory, it takes with it its customs, culture, and religion. The abandonment of the old religious order for the new "birdman" religion as evidenced by these statues must be understood as the outcome of invasion. Listening   Response time: 20 minutes 

Question 2 back to top

 Question

 Is it more important to be able to work with a group of people on a team or to work independently? Use reasons and specific examples to support your answer. Response time: 30 minutes 

Powerful Note-taking General Strategy back to top

 First, we're going to review the general idea behind taking good notes. This is important so study this section carefully. First, listen to the lecture below and take notes by yourself naturally (do this again if you've already done it for the listening and or speaking; review, review, review). Then, look at my notes and compare them with yours. How are they different? How are they similar? After that, listen to my paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of the transcript of the lecture and how to take notes on it. Finally, listen to my explanation of my notes and the way to easily test if you're note-taking is effective. Good luck! Step 1: Listen First  Step 2: Compare Your Notes With Ours 

 Step 3: Listen and Follow along 

  

  

  Step 4: Listen to What Makes Good Notes 

  Review this as often as you need to and remember one key point: though we all have different goals, the best way to get everything you can out of this program is to review often (at least 5 times). With that, you'll shoot your score up more than you can imagine. Very important point! I want to ask you a quick question. Do you know what boxing is? Karate? Tae-kwon-do? Judo? Those are fighting arts, right? Can you imagine your first day in kick-boxing school? Imagine after learning the first lesson you feel so confident that you step into a fighting arena with a 20-year professional? What do you think might happen? Not something I'd like to picture. So, don't assume that after reading through this once that

you're perfect and ready to take perfect notes. This takes time and practice. Work your way up from your notes now. Don't try to write everything you hear. If you do it will be difficult to understand everything that you're actually writing down, which means you won't be able to turn those notes into sentences that make sense in your essay. Take notes so that when you finish, 90% are understandable. Though you may not have as many notes as you need for a perfect score, you'll be able to explain most of what you wrote, which is how you develop writing skill and earn the highest score possible. 

A Video Exercise to Perfect Your Notes back to top

  Besides reviewing this page, another tool to help you improve is a powerful exercise that we've developed specific to taking notes. Please watch it and follow the directions exactly and practice this exercise daily. Good luck! 

 

A Different Exercise For Building Listening Skill back to top

 One unique way to build listening skill is to challenge yourself with faster than normal speed speech. To do so intelligently, we've created a short, but powerful exercise to try to develop a stronger ear for English. Here are the steps 

-First, listen to a speech at normal speed-Take dictation as you listen (which means listen as many times as you need to to write down every word that you hear)-Master, practice, and memorize the transcript (dictation) that you created

-Then, listen to the same speech at faster speed and follow along in your transcript with your finger to keep pace with the professor-If you lose your place, start all over again and keep doing so until you're able to follow the speaker from the beginning to end without losing your place-Now, listen to the same speech at an even faster speed and use your finger to focus and follow along with every word-Do this as often as you need to until you're able to follow along from beginning to end.

 To help you out, we've created the audio to do this with. Review this exercise regularly. Good luck. Audio at normal speed (take dictation with this recording)  Audio at 1.5x normal speed (follow along with this)  Audio at 2x normal speed (follow along with this)  After this exercise, you should notice that when you listen to other lectures at this speed, it's a bit easier than it was before. It's a great exercise that a student actually introduced me to. She explained that she did this every day and played her recordings up to 2.5x their normal speed and it helped her tremendously. I hope you find this exercise equally helpful. Good luck!

Producing Great Content back to top

 On this page, you'll find videos that we've created to help you develop your content for each of the writing quesitons. Use these videos to get your

essays closer to our example essays in content and word count. This will catapult your score. Review them often to keep the details of the exercises mentioned here fresh in your mind. 

Improving Accuracy For Question 1 back to top

 This video is meant to review again the concept behind the 3-step writing process for creating a great essay that we discussed for question 1 in step 1.   

Compare And Contrast For Better Accuracy (Note-taking) back to top

 As you study through the writing system (and the listening and speaking too),  when you try a lecture for the second time (which means after you've practiced under test conditions with it), take the best notes that you can. Once you finish, compare our example notes with yours. Do they have the same amount of content? Do they have the same general keywords? Are they equally well organized? Do they each have similar indentation (spacing) and organization? If any of those answers is “no,” take notes on the listening again and again until you are able to answer “yes” to all of the questions. This exercise is tricky because you don’t just want to take more and more notes; you want to adjust the way that you take notes. If you do this every single time that you do a listening for the writing or any other section with listening on NoteFull, your score and your listening comprehension skills will improve dramatically. And since your maximum score is limited by the strength of your notes for this question, this exercise and skill is very important.   

Improving Word-count For Question 2 (Part 1) back to top

These videos are meant to take you step by step to a higher word count while maintaining great content. These videos are meant to expand on the video on writing great examples for question 2 in step 1. Getting your word count to 400  After mastering the previous video's concepts, you should now be able to regularly write essays that hit 400. Take your time to make sure this happens before watching the next video. Take it one step at a time. Then, watch the following video. If you have trouble applying what you've learned, try the exercise in our Part 2 dicussion below these videos. That exercise is designed to ensure that you take what you learn from these videos and get them to produce results on your essay in 30 minutes under exam conditions. Remember that your success comes from how closely you follow these lessons. As I state earlier, in tutoring sessions and through your emails, I often find that students who still struggle with word count after completing step 3 read these words but didn't do the exercises: no good. I know it takes time; but we have to do it to get results. You can do it and by doing so, we'll ensure that we get your writing score as quickly as possible. This will mean the difference between hitting your score in a few weeks rather than a few months (or even a few years). Getting your word count to 500   

Enhancing Word Count For Question 2 (Part 2) back to top

 

Use this exercise along with what you learned above to guarantee a higher word count with great content before your next test. First, we need to grasp (which means hold and understand) that it is hard for our mind to learn two things at once well. Imagine taking math and English at the exact same time. It doesn't make too much sense. You want your mind to focus on one thing at a time (at least that's my philosophy in learning and teaching; though we can engage in many other lessons on the unconscious level). How does this apply to improving word count? Before you master timing, you must master your content. Set your timer as a stopwatch where it counts up from 0 rather than down to 0. Start writing your essay through the process you learned in the videos and see how long it takes you to get to 400 words. You might repeat yourself and feel awkward as you write but get over it and keep going until you do. Give yourself time whether it takes 40 minutes or 2 hours. You need to engage your mind in this pursuit. Then, sit down and do this exercise again at another time (maybe the next day) with a different question. Work towards shortening the time that it takes. The first few tries will likely be similar but as you review our video for question 2 and continue to focus on brining down your time and bringing up your word count, it will get easier. Once you hit 400 within 30 minutes for two to three essay, move your goal up. Try 500 words. Again, the key to any exercise, any improvement, the development of any skill is patience, focus, and energy. Give it time and you will improve. I know that we're all in a rush; I understand completely. But, the fundamental rule of enahncing yourself stays the same. Our goal is to haul up (which means raise) your score as fast as humanly possible but it still takes time. Let us know how you do with the exercise and good luck with it. 

Increasing Your Typing Speed For Greater Word Count back

to top

 In my experience, this is not something to worry too much about. Even though you may be slow, if you write at about 20 words per minute, you have more than enough ability to write an essay with a word count capable of getting you to a 30 out of 30 on the writing section.  It's mainly the flow of ideas and wasting time checking and rechecking spelling, grammar, punctuation, and your sentences that destroys your word count. However, there are several free resources available for you to develop this skill and maybe have some fun while doing it.  Here's a site to have fun while finding out your typing speed. You compete with others and see who's faster. I tried it; my word count is 78 with 94% accuracy. Can you beat me? Let me know. 

http://play.typeracer.com/ In the site below, you can engage in free lessons to help you type in the currently accepted standard format: with all your fingers resting on asdfjkl; 

http://www.typingweb.com/ This is the way that I learned in school, but as an instructor it's important for me to let you know that this is an inefficient method that has already been repleaced but don't tell any computer companies that. Here's an interesting article to open your eyes to how there's always a better way to do anything (which is why we took the time to do our best to guide you in your studies with specially developed exercises). 

Discover Magazine (you'll also learn a bit more than you expect)

Improving Your Writing Mechanics back to top

 In this series of videos, the goals is to help you along the path towards a stronger writing style to ensure a top score. Mechanics do matter, not as much as content, but they do matter. Please review these videos often because they represent the core of what will help you to "clean up" your writing quickly for faster improvements in your score. 

Punctuation Basics back to top

 This video is important because nearly every single essay that we've ever received has consistent errors with periods and capitalization. Make sure to review this video knowing that it is likely to strengthen your writing if you take its lessons to heart. Enjoy!  

Spelling Better back to top

 Most students have a fairly good ability to spell, but some haven't really developed their spelling skills through their years of English and it shows strongly in their essays. This video is meant to introduce and exercise to boost your spelling ability rapidly. This exercise is important for those of us who misspell about 2+ words per paragraph. Though I mentioned this before, I must mention it again: do not practice writing with an automatic spell checker. It destroys the effectiveness of your study time.  

Mastering Writing Mechanics Fast back to top

 The following exercise was created for a student who had serious trouble with spelling and punctuation. It seemed that basic exercises weren't working; this one did. First, look at our example essay for question 1 (and then apply this exercise to question 2). Read the first sentence carefully out loud to yourself. Then, write out exactly what you read. Write out the sentence exactly as you remember it. Do this only from memory. Do not look at the sentence again as you do this. Once you finish the sentence, compare it with the original example essay. What changes did you make? Did we drop a punctuation mark? Did we have awkward spacing between words? Did we forget an article (a, an, the)? Did we misspell any words? This is a fantastic exercise because it not only shows you instantly what your common mistakes are so that you can focus on them but also teaches you by showing you a perfect example of what you're trying to create. After you've noted and understood your mistakes. Cross out the old sentence that you wrote and read the same sentence in the example essay again. Then, again, write the sentence from memory. Is it perfect? Keep doing this until it is perfect. This may take some time and a lot of patience as you develop your skills with this exercise but it will have an unimaginable impact on your writing and your score. In addition, as you go through every sentence of the essay like this, review the development of the essay to better master the presentation of ideas and our successful strategy. With focus, patience, and energy, this exercise will move your writing to the next level.Rewiew

Practice Test 3 back to top

 Remember to compare your notes to ours. Are they similar? If not, do the question again taking notes again until they do look similar so that you have a good set of notes to speak from. Remember to compare your recording to ours. Are they similar? If not, try to record again. When you do this, take your time to understand how our answers come directly from our notes and we explain them simply and clearly. That's exactly what you want to do. Again, this is to make you an intelligent TOEFL-test-taking-machine. Feel comfortable and smooth as you practice. Don't put too much pressure on yourself. 

Question 1 back to top

 Reading Approximately 500 years ago, the flourishing society of Easter Island suffered a steep decline in population. Many theories have surfaced explaining how this could have happened to such a thriving culture. Within this small, isolated island in the Pacific Ocean, researchers have uncovered archaeological evidence that clearly indicates one theory for the decimation of the Easter Islanders above all others: invaders. First, the disappearance of nearly every tree on this Island points to the kind of environmental destruction that could only result from foreign incursions. Researchers discovered that this land now devoid of trees was once covered with palms. Biological evidence indicates an abundance of palm for centuries until about 500 years ago, the time when the population nearly vanished. Only invaders could have brought about that kind of destruction all at once. 

Another key piece of support lies in the archeological discovery of spear tips that appeared at around the same time as the near destruction of the Islanders. These spear tips show beyond any doubt that there was conflict and warfare on the island best explained by the onslaught of invaders. In addition to these war implements, skeletons from that time have been examined and show the kind of deformation that results only from combat. Last, the appearance of a new religion provides more support. Special dating methods used by archeologists determined that “birdman” statues surfaced at the same time as the dramatic shift in population. As history proves time and time again, when an invading force occupies a new territory, it takes with it its customs, culture, and religion. The abandonment of the old religious order for the new "birdman" religion as evidenced by these statues must be understood as the outcome of invasion. Transcript  In history, there are many cases of mysterious occurrences, cultures, and habitats and it is true that the disappearance of the Easter Islanders no longer holds a place among them. However, the notion that invaders created the decline is sadly incorrect. Internal factors were responsible.  To begin, invaders did not destroy the trees. Various island communities inhabited Easter Island and each was renowned for the enormous stone statues it erected. They were a symbol of status and each community raised as many as possible to promote its cultural dominance. These huge statues were positioned across the island with rollers made of tree logs. As more statues were built more trees were cut down to make the rollers to place them. It was this competition that destroyed the trees on the island, not invaders.

 Second, the spear tips didn’t come from invaders. The islanders created these weapons of warfare, and they didn’t create them for defense against invaders but to attack their fellow islanders. 500 years ago, their resources nearly vanished. The trees were disappearing leaving few as material for the canoes needed to go out to sea for fish. With resources virtually depleted and food diminishing, these spear tips evidence nothing more than a civil war fought for limited resources. Third, the “birdman” statue does indicate the birth of a new religious symbol, but it was not brought by invaders. As I explained earlier, this was a very difficult time for the islanders. Seeing their resources almost exhausted, their family dying of starvation, and their people at war could only have shown them that their current religious practices were ineffective, so naturally they began to adopt new ones, the “birdman” being a symbol connected with one of them. Example notes 

 Example essay The article claims that invaders decimated the Easter Islanders and provides three reasons of support. Conversely, the professor states that internal factors destroyed the Easter Island population and refutes each of the author’s reasons. 

First, the reading explains that the trees on the island disappeared when the population decreased and that only invaders could create this kind of environmental destruction. The lecture opposes this by telling us that there were many communities on Easter Island. Each built many huge statues to show its dominance over others. To place these statues, tree logs were used. Consequently, this competition to build statues and show dominance led to the destruction of trees. Second, the author asserts that the appearance of spear tips when the population decreased proves the presence of invaders. The professor opposes this by explaining that the islanders created the spear tips to attack one another. He says that 500 years ago the trees disappeared, so islanders could not build canoes to find fish. Consequently, they started to fight a civil war for limited resources and food. Third, the article states that a “birdman” statue found on the island at the time of the population decline evidences a new religion that only invaders could have introduced. The lecture agrees that the statue proves that a new religion appeared at this time.However, he states that invaders didn’t bring it. At this time, there was starvation and war, so islanders saw that their contemporary religious practices were not effective. Naturally, they adopted a new one. Word count: 256 

Question 2 back to top

 Question 

Is it more important to be able to work with a group of people on a team or to work independently? Use reasons and specific examples to support your answer. Example notes 

  

Example answer (In this essay, I introduced an extra phrase in bold that states that both sides are important before I stated my opinion.) Work is an important part of our lives. No matter where we are or what we do, we cannot escape our responsibilities in school or at work. Some people believe that it is more important to be able to work in a group while others disagree. In my view, p style="font: 12pt/20pt Georgia, serif;color:#000000;">though both skills are important, the most successful people know how to work independently for two very important reasons. 

First, you don’t always have a group to depend on. The benefits of being able to work in a group are obvious, but most of the things we do in life require us to do it alone. Without this ability, it’s very hard to do things well. For example, when I was in university, I took a physics class. The professor who taught the class was good, but he wasn’t effective. It was hard to follow his lectures. Many students in the class, including me, formed study groups. We worked together in the library as a group. It was great. We learned a lot. However, I would study by myself afterwards too. It was important because I needed to really master it for the test. After the course I learned, that the students who focused only on group work didn’t do as well as those that also worked alone. When students had to take the test, they had to do it alone. They couldn’t depend on another’s idea or help. This experience taught me that the ability to work independently is much more important. Second, an independent mind comes from independent work. When you work in a group, you have to be part of the group. Sometimes, you give up some ideas or focus on what other group members want. This takes away your sense of independence. For example, I read a book on psychology a few weeks ago. It was an interesting book that talked about how groups influence people. The author provided an example about a jury in a court of law. I learned that there is a lot of pressure to agree in a jury. Most people follow others who state their opinion. She stated that when only one person disagreed with the group, many other people would follow. In other words, most people don’t say what they feel unless someone else does. This is a natural result of group work: few people lead others. Consequently, most people learn to follow and not lead. Since success often results from strong leaders and independent minds, this book helped show me that the ability to work in a group is not as important as the ability to work alone. In sum, we must know how to work both in a group and by ourselves to do well in life, but the ability to work independently is more important. Not

only does it help you succeed with more common work that you must do alone, but it also helps you develop the independent mind that is essential for success. We should all spend at least some time working alone. Word count: 500

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