The first is a very specific grammar point about one word. (I should mention that neither of these are actually strategies. Strategy #6: Decide if the question asks for an opinion or a preference.Strategy #5: Know the correct grammar for the verb prefer.For instance, here are two strategies from the writing chapter: The organization of the book is very strange and hard to follow. This makes the book better for new teachers rather than students. In other words, it’s not good for learning to use the strategies, only learning about the strategies. It will be boring and difficult for many students to read. And it’s not only that: there is a lot of text and description in that advanced English. That might be good reading practice, a challenge, but the book should communicate to everybody, not just be practice. It’s a bit too advanced for some students to read comfortably and understand everything. There is only one serious problem with the test strategy in this book. And because the most of the strategy is realistic and helpful, I can forgive some inaccuracies. That’s misleading, but being careful about the logic of answer choices will never hurt you it’s just not very important. That is, they are wrong because of logic tricks, not language tricks. You won’t need that on your TOEFL.īesides that, some of the wrong answer types (The book calls them “distractors”) are more like GRE, SAT, or GMAT questions. The author recommends knowing scientific facts like the periodic table, but that’s a waste of time. And there’s a lot more good strategy-it’s very rare that this book gives bad strategy. Kaplan recognizes that and tells you the truth: take notes, but focus on listening, not writing. If you do, you won’t be able to listen at the same time. You simply cannot take very detailed notes. Many books don’t recognize that, but Kaplan’s book does.Īnother point that many other books miss is how detailed notes should be.
Context can help sometimes, but that’s not the main point. For example, vocabulary questions in the reading section are mostly just a test of whether you know the word. The author gives realistic descriptions and advice. I agreed strongly with almost every sentence I read. If you follow all of the advice in this book, you will answer the questions on the TOEFL effectively. Let’s start with the good part of the book.
If you aren’t buying a TPO test (or a TOEFL prep book, which also include practice tests), you should take the Sampler all in one sitting so you can get the experience of a nearly full-length test, but if you already have a lot of other practice tests to use, you can also take the different sections one at a time.
To say it simply, this book isn’t for students. But three days later, I was really, really disappointed. And I knew it wasn’t just the book-you get access to online material, too. Yes, I found a few mistakes, but mostly I was excited to have a book that describes realistic, good test strategy. The first 20 minutes I spent with Kaplan’s book were great. Because of this, some of the info in our blog posts may not yet reflect the new exam format. The TOEFL will also make changes to its prep materials and scoring system. # Announcement! As of August 1, 2019, the TOEFL Reading, Listening and Speaking sections will be shortened.
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