TOEFL iBT Test Preparation

• Improve your vocabulary: It is essential to improve your vocabulary by learning new words every day. If you are working, you should study using “flashcards”, attach new vocabulary by topic at your desk, bring notes with you at lunch, etc. Along with learning vocabulary, you must practice using these words in writing and speaking and practice reading and understanding passages in the TOEFL reading test.
• Reading skills: In the beginning, I recommend that you practice reading and understanding academic articles or passages and summarize the main content. For the TOEFL reading test, the synthesis and structure questions take up a lot of space and also contain trick questions. Therefore, you should practice underlining or writing down keywords of each paragraph and the whole passage.
• Speaking skills: You can only improve your speaking ability by speaking and recording yourself according to the topics and questions of the TOEFL test, then listening back and correcting your intonation and voice. Besides, you should sit in front of a mirror to practice "dialogue", avoiding losing confidence when entering the exam room. For those who do not have standard pronunciation or are weak in this skill, I recommend that you take TOEFL courses at the center because it is really difficult to correct mistakes and improve speaking skills by yourself.
• Listening skills: To get a high score in the listening test, you need to practice taking notes on the words you hear and the keywords, and remember to check your spelling when writing English. Some of you, even though you hear correctly, cannot distinguish the sounds, leading to choosing the wrong result in the test. Especially for listening skills, you should practice every day for at least 30 minutes if your listening ability is quite good or more.
• Writing skills: The TOEFL writing test requires you to write a minimum of about 300 words. However, you should practice writing about 500 words to achieve high results in writing skills. For the writing test, you will be greatly affected by time psychology, so practice setting a timer from the first days you practice this skill to get used to the time pressure. Before starting to write, what you need to do is outline, write down vocabulary and academic phrases to "score points", then start writing the introduction and conclusion to avoid the situation of "the elephant's head and the mouse's tail", running out of time but not having time to write the conclusion!

Learn more about TOEFL learning roadmap

You can absolutely study by yourself if you know how to motivate yourself and have effective learning methods. However, if you are someone who gives up easily and often procrastinates, ETEST does not recommend you to study by yourself at home, instead, you should carefully research the best TOEFL courses for beginners.