I did a follow-up interview with my friend and TOEFL Tutor Han Joon Lee about some of the teaching methods he uses in Korea. This one might be a bit too inside-baseball for some, but I think a few readers here are interested in how test prep is done around the world. A few highlights:
- Overall, he thinks the TOEFL is a pretty good test. Test-takers build their fluency while preparing for the test. They do tend to improve in all four key skills.
- He really likes the massive vocabulary books that are available in Korea. Memorizing those 2000 words is helpful for the reading section. This somewhat surprised me.
- He thinks that practice reading sets are useful, but test-takers can go overboard. Instead of blowing through 100 sets before taking the test, it is often better to use just a few dozen and examine them at a sentence-by-sentence level. Test-takers might consider spending a couple of hours on a single reading passage and really understand the function of each sentence.
- Dictation and shadowing are key for the listening section. It can be useful to spend a few hours working with just a short passage.
- Non-TOEFL conversation practice is really, really useful. Seek it out.
- Feedback, feedback, feedback. People need speaking and writing feedback before they take the test. Tutors need to be harsh.
- Student buy-in matters. Students need to understand that high scores require a lot of work. This doesn’t seem to be a problem when it comes to test-takers in Korea.
I’ve got a great spit-take at about 17:50.