Test of English as a Foreign Language, 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 a mandatory test to give if you want to pursue your higher education in the United States as an international student.
The TOEFL test is the most widely respected English-language test in the world, recognized by more than 10,000 colleges, universities and agencies in more than 130 countries, including Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the United States. Wherever you want to study, the TOEFL test can help you get there.
The TOEFL iBT test, delivered via the internet, is an important part of your journey to study in an English-speaking country.
It is now possible to take the test within one to four weeks in most countries.
FORMAT
The total time duration of the test is 4 hours and the test consists of four sections, each measuring one of the basic language skills, and all tasks focus on language used in an academic, higher-education environment.
The four sections of the test are:
Reading
This section is designed in a way that it consists of 3-5 passages each of which are of approximately 700 words in length. Don’t worry, the content of the passages is from your textbooks or some general topics.
Students answer questions about main ideas, details, inferences, essential information, sentence insertion, vocabulary, rhetorical purpose and overall ideas.
Passages require understanding of rhetorical functions such as cause-effect, compare-contrast and argumentation.
Listening
In this section you will be listening to 6 passages of 3-5mins in length and then you will have to answer questions on the basis of what you have listened and understood. These passages include two student conversations and four academic lectures or discussions.
You can make notes while listening to the passage, it is allowed.
Each conversation is associated with five questions and each lecture with six. The questions are meant to measure the ability to understand main ideas, important details, implications, relationships between ideas, organization of information, speaker purpose and speaker attitude.
Speaking
In this section you get 6 tasks, 2 independent and 4 integrated.
In the two independent tasks, test-takers answer opinion questions on familiar topics. They are evaluated on their ability to speak spontaneously and convey their ideas clearly and coherently.
In two of the integrated tasks, 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.
In the two remaining integrated tasks, test-takers listen to an academic course lecture or a conversation about campus life and then respond to a question about what they heard. In the integrated tasks, test-takers are evaluated on their ability to appropriately synthesize and effectively convey information from the reading and listening material.
Writing
This section consists of 2 tasks, 1 integrated and 1 independent, here your ability to write in an academic setting is tested.
In the integrated task, 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 independent 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.
Responses are sent to the ETS OSN and evaluated by at least 3 different raters.
The TOEFL iBT test is scored on a scale of 0 to 120 points.
Each of the four sections receives a scaled score from 0 to 30.
There is a 10 mins break in between the test after 2 sections.
Hope you understand all the details you need to know about different sections in TOEFL. Keep reading our blog for other useful topics!
To know about toefl you can also refer to this web link : http://www.ets.org/toefl