I’ve been uploading a bunch of new videos to the Youtube channel. But here’s an old one about the second TOEFL writing task which I’m quite fond of. Do check it out if you are prepping for the test.
Category: Writing
I just uploaded the 2025 versions of my TOEFL writing templates to Youtube! Below is the video. Scroll down for the templates themselves and some explanations.
So I did things a bit differently in 2025. For starters, I produced unique templates for all three of the integrated writing “styles” – casting doubt, problems and solutions, solutions and problems. Basically, all three styles have the same body paragraphs, but slightly different introductions.
TOEFL Integrated Essay
Here’s the full template for the “casting doubt” style integrated essay:
- The reading and the lecture are both about ______________.
- While the author of the article argues that _________, the lecturer disputes the claims presented in the article.
- His position is that ____________.
- First, the author argues that ______________.
- The article states that ______.
- The lecturer’s response is that _________.
- Moreover, ____________.
- Second, the author mentions that ______________.
- According to the article, ______.
- In contrast, the lecturer argues that ____________.
- He notes that _______.
- Finally, the article notes that ______________.
- The author suggests that ______.
- However, the lecturer points out that ______.
- He says ____________.
I don’t think you need a conclusion.
If you get a problem/solution style question you can swap in this introduction:
- The reading and the lecture are both about ______________.
- While the article describes three associated problems, the lecturer suggests possible solutions to each of them.
- His position is that ____________.
And if you get a solution/problem style question you can use this one:
- The reading and the lecture are both about ______________.
- While the article describes three solutions to this problem, the lecturer explains why they aren’t effective.
- His position is that ____________.
TOEFL Academic Discussion Question
Next, for the academic discussion question I decided to greatly simplify things by producing a single scaled-down template for both the preference and open-ended styles. Here ya go:
- While I appreciate the points made by both ______ and ____, I strongly believe that _____.
- This is because _____.
- For example, ______.
- Some people may argue that _____, but they overlook the fact that ______.
Student often get worried because they didn’t hit the “submit” or “continue” button at the end of one of the TOEFL writing tasks before time ran out. They worry that their answer wasn’t saved, and that it won’t be graded.
Don’t worry: whatever was on your screen when time ran out was submitted automatically. It will be graded. It is not necessary to hit the “submit” or “continue” button.
This has come up a million times, and has never been a problem. You can stop worrying now!
Pearson’s Sarah Hughes gave a great webinar yesterday called “The Role of Automated, AI, and Human Scoring” (link). She discussed the ways in which Pearson spots what they call “Topic Templates” in the writing section of the PTE and what is done after they are detected. It was my first time to hear the term “topic templates” (as opposed to just “templates”), which is meant to distinguish between the memorization of typical discourse phrases and the memorization of a whole lot of generic junk into which a few topic-related phrases are plugged.
Pearson’s primary line of defense against topic templates seems to be a database of such templates created by a bot that crawls the web now and then. When signs of a template are detected in a student response, that response is sent to a human rater (or raters?) to determine if the answer is acceptable or should be given a score of zero. Note that most of the time human raters are not used to score the PTE writing section, which is handled entirely by AI.
I know I sound like a broken record every time this comes up, but I’d love to hear more about the detection of templates that aren’t widely circulated online. I’ve linked to it a million times, but Sugene Kim’s article about preparing for the TOEFL test “Gangnam Style” is required reading for anyone interested in this topic.
The article describes how, here in Korea, students prepping for a test hire a hotshot tutor – one mentioned in Kim’s article is nicknamed “The Writing Sniper” – to craft a handful of bespoke templates just for them. The students don’t get just the templates, of course, but also receive weeks of lessons about how to use them most effectively. Needless to say, the templates don’t show up in any databases possessed by the testing firms.
When Kim’s article was published I had some fun creating my own topic templates for this task. They fooled a lot of people with experience in the industry. You can read about my fun in a four-part series of blog posts starting over here.
The Gangnam approach somewhat suited the old TOEFL independent writing task, which had a lot of pretty formulaic questions like:
“Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? It is better to use printed materials such as books and articles to do research than it is to use the internet. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.”
It’s a bit less suitable for the IELTS, where the questions are sometimes (but not always) a bit more intricate. Like:
“In spite of the advances made in agriculture, many people around the world still go hungry. Why is this the case? What can be done about this problem?”
The PTE has also has somewhat intricate questions like:
“Tobacco, mainly in the form of cigarettes, is one of the most widely-used drugs in the world. Over a billion adults legally smoke tobacco every day. The long term health costs are high – for smokers themselves, and for the wider community in terms of health care costs and lost productivity. Do governments have a legitimate role to legislate to protect citizens from the harmful effects of their own decisions to smoke, or are such decisions up to the individual.”
Obviously the effectiveness of a topic template is blunted by the various aspects that the PTE and IELTS prompts the test taker to touch on. The PTE adds a firm word count limit to the mix which could further complicate things.
But the tests are still vulnerable. The hotshots are good at what they do. As they should be, considering the sky-high fees they sometimes command.
With that said, one is left wondering how the test makers detect templates that are not widely shared online and which are not reused by multiple students across numerous tests administrations. Without a relevant database and without human raters who might notice their stilted nature, Pearson likely requires an AI solution specifically designed to spot them. Is that part of the mix?
The continued use of human raters to score the IELTS might be an advantage, but I haven’t heard much from the IELTS partnership on this topic, even when it comes to widely circulated templates. Do they supplement the expertise of their humans with a database of templates each essay is compared to? Or are they entirely dependent on humans? Humans are good… but are they good enough to beat The Writing Sniper? That’s unclear.
I think it is also worth mentioning that such templates are best used by students with intermediate language skills who want to pass themselves off as advanced students. They have the ability to “fill in the blanks” of the templates with more than just a topic keyword, but with decent clauses or sentences. This makes detection trickier than you might expect.
Questions of equity linger in the back of my mind, as well. Do current detection methods focus on low-hanging fruit? Are they good at detecting low or no-budget test preppers who use stuff they find on social media but poor at stopping the techniques favored by preppers with a few thousand bucks to spend before taking a test?
Do share your own thoughts, if you have a moment. More on this in the future.
We can use “might have” and “must have” when we are making deductions about the past.
Use “might have” (or “may have”) + the past participle when you are not totally certain of something. Like:
- I’m not totally sure, but I might have failed the test.
- Historians aren’t certain, but the silver coin found in Maine may have been left there by Viking explorers.
Use “must have” + the past participle when you are more certain. Like:
- The test was extremely difficult. I must have failed it.
- There is no other explanation. The silver coin found in Maine must have been left there by Viking explorers.
The British Council has a great article about this topic!
“Watch” is generally used to refer to an object that is moving, and to an object that takes place over a period of time. Like a football game or a television show. For example:
- Tomorrow I will watch a football game in London.
- Did you watch the new episode of “Doctor Who” last night?
“Look at” is generally used to refer to an object for a shorter period of time, often to observe details. The object is often unmoving. Like a menu or a painting. For example:
- I looked at the menu, but didn’t find anything I wanted.
- While I was at the Smithsonian, I looked at a lot of famous paintings.
The folks at Duolingo have published an article (and matching blog post) about how much time test takers should be given to complete writing tasks. Their research suggests that shorter tasks are just as useful as longer tasks in terms of reliability and validity.
This is a controversial topic among people who take the time to look at the sorts of tasks that are included on tests of English proficiency. It has generated some discussion.
Nowadays, both test makers and test takers seem to favor test forms that are shorter (in duration) than those used in the past. Since long essay tasks require a significant amount of time to complete, they are less popular than they used to be. Recall that last year the 300(ish) word “Independent Essay” task was dropped from the TOEFL, in favor of a 100(ish) word “Academic Discussion” response, meant to simulate a message board interaction. Research provided by ETS indicates that the shorter task is just as useful as the longer one it replaced.
A separate (but related) controversy relates to how closely test items should resemble real-world tasks carried out by students in the course of their future studies. The move to shorter writing tasks means that newer tests often include items that do not simulate real academic work. Some people find this problematic. Some do not. Yet others argue that the tasks on more traditional tests never actually simulated this sort of thing in the first place.
I finally uploaded the 2024 version of my video guide to TOEFL Writing Question 1 (the Integrated Essay). Check it out!
In recent days, many people have reported seeing “not available” in the academic discussion response section of their TOEFL score report. It looks a bit like this:
This means that AI-generated information about your response is not available. Why does this happen? It happens because your response could not be scored by ETS’s e-rater AI and was scored only by human raters.
Why could the AI not score your response? That is unclear, but it sometimes happens if a response is extremely long.
Some students have reported that their writing scores are unusually low when this happens. I don’t know what to say about that.
Leave a comment below if you have seen this in your score report.
No clients to write for at the moment, so I finally have a moment to produce my own material. Here’s a new TOEFL integrated writing practice question.
It’s about banning CFL light bulbs. The topic represents an effort to make questions that are more tedious and obscure than what test takers usually find in practice materials. As it is a first draft, let me know if you spot any typos or unclear phrases.
I realize now that I must stop writing so many lecture “paragraphs” that begin with some variation on “as for the argument about xxxxx.”
According to the pile of post-it notes on my desk, next up is a question about whether or not a certain ring belonged to Caligula. Apparently I read an article about that topic earlier this year.
Earlier this year I helped a student prepare for the ALP Essay Exam. I couldn’t find much information about the test online, so I thought I would write a few notes here. I might revise this post in the future, so stop by in the future for updates. If you need tutoring for the ALP Essay exam, you can contact me.
What is the ALP Essay Exam?
The ALP Essay Exam is used by Columbia University to assess the writing skills of students. It is often used to determine if students have the language skills necessary to take classes at the university. It can also be used to determine if students should take supplementary writing classes (in addition to their regular schedule of classes). Test-takers have 105 minutes to write a standard (four or five paragraph) argumentative essay about a specific topic. The essay must be based on the contents of two short academic articles.
You can read about it over here.
What Does the ALP Essay Exam Look Like?
You’ll get a question about a serious topic. Don’t expect something basic and simple like the IELTS. Instead, expect something that might actually be studied in a first-year university class. You might get something about gentrification, affirmative action, the use of standardized testing… that sort of thing. The question might look like this:
“Please read the two passages below. The authors have differing opinions about the topic of gentrification in the United States. Which author do you agree with, and to what extent? In your essay you should support your opinion, and challenge the opinions of the author you disagree with. You have 105 minutes to complete your essay.”
The passages should be fairly short. Maybe just a paragraph or two, excerpted from a longer article. They will have opposing opinions on the same topic. The author of each one will be credited
If the topic is gentrification, they might look like this:
“One of the most significant benefits of gentrification is the improvement of housing. Ordinarily, housing presents enormous challenges in the management of urban centers. Therefore, gentrification seems to solve this challenge because it favors the improvement of housing within the gentrified community. In addition, it is believed to stabilize declining areas. In most cities, suburban areas are known to experience degradation leading to the emergence of slums. This phenomenon is caused by the increased strain on urban infrastructure and services. Therefore, gentrification addresses an array of urban management challenges by reducing suburban sprawl and strain on the existing infrastructure.
Another positive effect of gentrification is the increase in property values. As a result, property owners reap high income from real estate investment, and this serves as a means of attraction for potential businesses. It is also suggested that gentrification leads to a significant increase of local fiscal revenues. Moreover, gentrification has led to the rehabilitation of property with little state sponsorship. Therefore, an increase in property values and local fiscal revenues promote economic development of gentrified areas. Economic development is also enhanced by an increase in purchasing power in the centralized economy, although it is uneven.
It is also believed that gentrification leads to increased social mix and reduction in crime rates. This phenomenon has been evidenced in gentrified cities such as London, Atlanta and Washington, DC.
-Caroline Mutuku
and:
Gentrification usually leads to negative impacts such as forced displacement, a fostering of discriminatory behavior by people in power, and a focus on spaces that exclude low-income individuals and people of color.
During gentrification, poorer communities are commonly converted to high-end neighborhoods with expensive housing options such as high-rises and condominiums. As property prices increase, the original residents of the neighborhood are forced out in a variety of ways. First, with an increase in the prices of buildings, the gap between the price of the building and the income that the landlord gets from renting the building grows bigger; landlords thus increase rent prices, which forces out the low-income residents. As building prices continue to increase, the problem exacerbates because it becomes even more profitable to convert these apartment buildings into non-residential areas. Additionally, since investors can earn more money from selling buildings, real-estate dealers have less incentive to improve the buildings. The real estate dealers instead sell the buildings at higher prices. This cycle of rising building prices continues until only large and well-financed investors are able to continue.
Displacement… is disproportionately borne by low-income individuals of color, many of whom are elderly individuals. Physical frailty makes it more challenging for elderly individuals to resist the actions that landlords take to remove tenants. Researchers have also found that elderly people are more intensively affected by social changes around them; for example, many older adults cited loss of friendships or community networks as a reason to move.
-Emily Chong
How to Structure the Essay
The structure is fairly easy. Write an introduction that provides some background on the topic and a clear thesis statement that states your opinion on the topic. Then write two or three body paragraphs. Each one should focus on a specific argument in support of your argument or the rebuttal of a specific point in the article you don’t agree with. Finally, write a conclusion that sums of what you’ve just created. Aim for 400 to 600 words in total. Easy, right?
How to Get a Good Score
Getting a good score isn’t so easy. To award you a high score, the rater needs to see an argument, but they also need to see the use of fairly sophisticated writing techniques. The list below is drawn from the official ALP website, and a few other sources used in ALP classes at Columbia.
- Parallel Structures
- Given-new information flow
- Inversion and Fronting
- Appositives
- Noun clauses in subject position
Remember that your essay must also quote from the sources when appropriate.
Remember, also, that in addition to this advanced stuff, your essay needs to show mastery of basic stuff. That means basic transitions (therefore, however, in addition) and a mix of all three sentence types (simple, compound, complex). You also need nearly perfect grammar to get a high score.
Sample Paragraphs
I can’t teach you the basic stuff here, but I can show you examples of the advanced concepts mentioned above.
Here’s a sample paragraph from an essay I wrote about mental health. I’ve underlined parts that use the above techniques. In order, they are: parallel structure, using the article, appositive, noun clause in subject position, inversion.
Young people are able to discuss their mental health challenges with others, and are willing to reach out for help when necessary. As the article by Smith indicates, 62% of millennials are comfortable with this. Proof is easy to find. Many organizations have taken up the suggestion of the Center for Workplace Mental Health and created departments which help workers cope with issues as they arise. In addition, employee benefits now include financial support for outside counseling and psychological care. Even more indicative of this trend is the recent emergence of businesses which profit from the desire that young people have to discuss their mental health. Several new smartphone apps, services jokingly referred to as “Uber for Counseling,” have made a lot of money connecting people with therapists. With just a few clicks, we can be connected with a therapist and receive their assistance via voice or text. The benefits are clear; when people are willing to talk about issues that challenge them, and there are people willing to listen to them, they can be given strategies that mitigate the negative effects or perhaps eliminate the issues altogether. Rarely do people today find themselves in an environment where they have absolutely no one to turn to. This is quite a shift from even just a few decades ago, when sufferers of mental illness often felt lost at sea.
Next is part of a paragraph about reparations. I’ve underlined an example of fronting, and an example of an appositive. Note the extensive quotes from the article, which are integrated into my own sentences.
While long-term solutions to today’s problems must certainly involve political and economic changes, the political and economic systems are slow to change. With great enthusiasm, conservative journalist Frank Williamson says that “the political interests of African Americans… are best served by equality under the law.” Williamson, an experienced political writer, knows that politicians have been working towards “equality under the law” for decades, and are still far from achieving it.
Here is an introductory paragraph from an essay about inclusive language. Note how I’ve underlined a parallel structure, fronting, and another parallel structure. Note that I ended with a clear thesis statement.
They say that people change over time, and that language changes along with them. Nowadays, thanks to the spread of the Internet, language seems to be changing at a more rapid pace than ever before. Rarely do we go a week without reading an article or seeing a social media post that uses a term or phrase that is totally new to us. Many of us want to be supportive of marginalized groups, and we want to express our opinions clearly without being lost in a sea of jargon. Personally, I feel that our choice of words is very important, but we must be careful to avoid being overly judgmental of people who can’t keep up with the newest words.
Wrapping Up
Okay, so that’s a broad look at what the ALP test looks like and what you need to do. For more help, or tutoring, feel free to contact me. To keep up with the latest changes to this test, contact Columbia University.
Amazon is now shipping copies of the new Official Guide to the TOEFL. As noted a few days ago, the guide no longer contains certain long running inaccuracies, so it’s probably a good time to record the Saga of the Altruism Question.
In late 2005 the first edition of “The Official Guide to the New TOEFL iBT” was published. It contained numerous inaccuracies. One can’t really blame the writers, as they compiled the book before the test launched. It brings to mind those early Star Trek: The Next Generation paperbacks where Troi calls Riker “Bill” and Tasha Yar has long hair.
The most notable errors were two depictions of the integrated writing task. One about group work (contained in the chapter about the writing section), and one about altruism (found in the practice set). I can go into details in the comments if you like, but basically this question has a very specific form and neither of the samples followed it.
Sadly, these two questions also appeared in the second edition, published in 2006.
By this time, third party publishers were releasing their own TOEFL prep books. And here’s the thing: they naturally based their books on the contents of the Official Guide. As a result, every single one of them contained terrible integrated writing questions. I’ll try to create a slideshow below that highlights some examples. Sorry… it will probably look like trash on mobile.
For the most part, major publishers are adverse to spending money, so these errors remained in the books for ages. Kaplan included terrible integrated writing questions in their famous purple books right to the day they discontinued them. Princeton Review added a new integrated writing question to the 2024 edition of their TOEFL book which is horrific. If you squint at it long enough you’ll notice that it was inspired by the Official Guide.
Had the original book contained proper questions, this problem could have been avoided.
Anyway, the bad questions remained in the third edition, which was published in 2009.
By this time I was teaching TOEFL. At least twice a week someone would send me a practice essay based on the famous altruism question and ask me to grade it. Every time I’d politely explain that even though the question came from the Official Guide, it wasn’t accurate and it would be a waste of their time and money to have me check it. Fifteen years later, I still have to explain that a few times a month.
The questions remained in the fourth edition, published in 2012. By this time ETS had licensed dozens of retired tests to New Oriental, so the proper format was widely known.
The questions remained in the fifth edition, published in 2017.
Teachers were hopeful that the sixth edition, published in 2021, would not contain these faulty questions given that the book required radical revisions to match the changes to the test of 2019. Sadly… it appeared once more.
But hey. It’s 2024 now. Nineteen years have passed. The bad questions have finally been removed from the book.
Hey, so I’ve reduced the price of my TOEFL ebook to 99 cents on Amazon. The book covers the TOEFL iBT writing section and contains some of the best practice questions and answers I’ve created over the years. It also collects a bunch of the grammar articles that appeared on this blog before August of last year. If that seems like the sort of the thing that might interest you, do pick up a copy on Amazon. The book is no longer part of the Kindle Unlimited program, so even Prime members can buy a copy. It is also available in paperback, but obviously that’s a bit more expensive. Buying a copy will help me fulfill my dream of having the best-selling TOEFL book on Amazon, where I’m currently #6.
