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TOEFL Talk with Steve Ford.
Hello, and welcome to a new video series, privateenglishportal.com. My name is Steven Ford and I am your online private English teacher. We are doing a TOEFL talk series, which will deal with the Speaking section of the TOEFL as well as the writing section of the TOEFL.
Now, before I go into my first speaking section, pointers and tips, I would like to tell you a little bit of my experience as a TOEFL teacher. I first started teaching TOEFL back in 1996 and that was to a school that was licensed to apply the TOEFL test. And, to prepare the students, we would receive a little TOEFL book, and this is a TOEFL Preparation book was a little rein book with some tapes, and that is all we have to go by in terms of preparing our students for the TOEFL.
And, of course, that has really progressed over the years and we have seen many books that have developed as the TOEFL test has developed from computer-based test to internet based test. And I have seen many books from Heinnman, to Longman, to Kaplan, to Delta’s Key. And, of course, some of those books I prefer more than others and, you would be able to find all of that note if you subscribe to my VIP Members Gold, little part of that.
Anyways, this test has evolved into what we have now the Internet-Based TOEFL Test. And, I am going to focus on in the next few videos is the speaking section of the TOEFL test. Now, we have six questions on the Speaking section. And, the first two questions are independent tasks, okay. Now, they are being evaluated by two evaluators, okay. And, it has been my experience as a Proctor and Evaluator for the Michigan test that this kind of approach is used also in the TOEFL test, whereby, one evaluator will be the good cap and one evaluator will be the bad cap.
Now, what does the good cap do? The good cap, usually, is very conciliatory, he is very welcoming, he will try to break the ice with you, and when—or he/she, sorry, let us be politically correct here. They will try to evaluate your abilities on a more Macroscopic level. What does that mean? It means that will try to evaluate your ideas rather than your grammatical structure, your use of idioms, your use of an expressions so on and so forth.
And, that is kind of a sag way into what I want to say about the bad cap, is that they will pay more attention to your grammatical structures, your use of lexicon, your use of transitions, your use of idioms, so on and so forth, okay. So, that is one very important piece of information to focus on when you are dealing that or evaluation online, okay, is to know exactly who is evaluating you.
Now, my second piece of information in this TOEFL Talk video is about state and support your opinion. Now, one very effective way to state and support your opinion is to try and use euphemisms and to be politically correct wherever you can and whenever you can. Now, when I say euphemisms, what do I mean? I mean that you put things in a very, very politically correct manner. And, I can give you some examples, for example, a mentally retarded, we would not longer say, we would say mentally challenged, okay. Or, we would no longer say, mailman, we would say letter carrier, all right. Instead of saying my mother died, it would be more proper to say my mother passed away.
These kinds of devices to use a language, which is less offensive to the ear, to the evaluator can be very instrumental, in terms of winning the evaluator over and getting that four--that mark of four on the speaking portion of the TOELF test.
So, those are my two very important pieces of information and I will be continuing with my TOEFL talk series, and I look forward to give you more information next week.
Bye-bye.
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