A few days ago, ETS briefed New Oriental on the upcoming changes to the TOEFL iBT test. Regular readers will know that New Oriental is one of the largest test prep firms in China and a longtime partner of ETS.
You can read the summary on QQ here, but a few things are worth mentioning here for the sake of emphasis. According to New Oriental’s summary:
- As we already know, the reading section will be adaptive. There will be two stages. The first will be a calibration stage that is the same difficulty level for everyone. The second will be an “easy” stage or a “hard” stage depending on the test taker’s performance in the first one. The calibration stage in the reading section will contain multiple short passages rather than a single long reading passage like in the current iteration of the test. Some of these shorter passages will resemble excerpts from textbooks like the passages currently on the test, but others will come from “sources like newspapers, magazines and websites.” The second stage will contain the same question types as the first.
- The listening section will also be adaptive, with two stages. The listening section will continue to include academic lectures and teacher-student conversations. On top of this, it will include “peer to peer conversations” focusing on scenarios such as group work.
- The speaking and writing sections will not be adaptive. They will be scored by both humans and AI, as is currently the case.
- An e-mail writing task will be added to the writing section. The academic discussion task will be retained. It is not stated whether or not the integrated writing task will also be retained.
- A virtual interview question will be added to the speaking section. This appears to be similar to the five-question interview currently included in the TOEFL Essentials Test (5 short questions on the same topic, 30 seconds to speak each time). It is not stated whether or not the speaking questions currently on the TOEFL iBT will be removed or modified to make room for this.
- Starting January 21, score reports will include both the 1-120 traditional TOEFL score and a new 1-6 score linked to the CEFR. It appears that both scores will be included on score reports for at least two years.
- The time it takes to complete the test will remain about the same (roughly two hours).
A few specific dates were mentioned by New Oriental: practice tests will be available July 7 of this year and content changes will go live on January 21 of next year.