Here's the TOEFL speaking class schedule for June:
Wednesday classes are 7-10 p.m., Saturday afternoon classes are 3-6 p.m., and Sunday classes are 10:00-13:00 and 3-6 p.m.
Orientation for new students will be Sunday, May 31 from 3-6 p.m. Attendance at orientation is required for all new students.
The price is ￥55,000 for classes and ￥11,000 for orientation (both 税込).
Classes are limited to four students per class. All classes are taught by Donald Miller.
Here are some notes / advice on the TOEFL email writing task.
This task is from ETS’s Teachers Resources, Test 1.
You are planning a business trip to another city. Your colleague, Maria, recently traveled to the same city for work. You want to ask her recommendations for places to eat and things to do during your free time.
Write an email to Maria. In your email, do the following.
Explain why you are traveling to the city.
Ask for her recommendations about restaurants and activities.
Mention what you’d most like to do and what you’d like to avoid.
To: Maria
Subject: Recommendations for Upcoming Business Trip
***
Here are some annotated notes and an answer that I wrote.
You are planning a business trip to another city (1). Your colleague, Maria (2), recently traveled to the same city for work (3). You want to ask her recommendations for places to eat and things to do (4) during your free time (5).
(1) The prompt doesn’t provide the city name. I would choose a specific city. Yes, I would invent a detail, but I’d use a real city name.
One of the new words that ETS has introduced in the new 2026 rubrics is “elaboration.” (入念)
A 5.0 essay: “elaboration is effective.”
A 4.0 essay: “adequate elaboration.”
A 3.0 essay: “elaboration partially supports the [email].”
A 2.0 essay: “limited or irrelevant elaboration.”
Since Tokyo is familiar to my students, I’m using that.
(2) If the prompt gives you the email receiver’s given (first) name, you should use it in your email.
In this case, I would use “Hi Maria.”
If I’m contacting my boss, I think I’d use “Mr. Johnson” or whatever name is provided.
If it’s to a professor, I’d use “Dr. Johnson.”
You don’t want to write too formally to a friend, and you don’t want to write too casually to a supervisor or professor.
(3) This is the reason that you are contacting her, and it should be in your email.
(4) Note that there are two requests for information: places to eat and things to do.
(5) The prompt doesn’t tell you when the free time is, so you should invent that detail. It’s a business trip, so I’d assume that the free time is on the weekend.
The writing task:
Write an email to Maria. In your email, do the following.
Explain why you are traveling to the city.
Ask for her recommendations about restaurants and activities.
Mention what you’d most like to do and what you’d like to avoid.
In the following essay that I wrote, the invented details (elaboration, 入念) are underlined.
To: Maria
Subject: Recommendations for Upcoming Business Trip
I’ve got a business trip to Tokyo next month. I’ll be meeting our Japanese partners for ten days. And I wonder if you can help me plan part of my trip. I remember that you said you had a good stay there last year. I’ve heard that Tokyo has a good restaurant culture, so if there are any restaurants that you recommend, I’d love to hear about them. I like fish and salads, but I don’t really like spicy food. Also, I’m curious about what weekend activities you’d recommend. We spend so much time in the office, so I’d like to get outside and experience the local culture if possible.
Cheers!
Donald Miller
110 words
A student asked me about factors for language-learning success. Here are ten things off the top of my head:
Here are the answers to the "Common Mistakes" handout this week. Corrections are mostly in red:
I saw beautiful coral reefs and yellow, red, and blue tropical fish.
I
like to watch CNN nNews
on YoutTube.
I
saw a short video about the origin of the universe on the TED tTalk
app yesterday.
I
like the characters, especially Elsa, and songs,
such as 'Let it gGo.'
I
watched famous comedy movies, such as "Breakfast at
Tiffany's.”.
(The
period goes inside
the quotation marks)
So,
I watch entertaining movies, especially heroic movies or adventure
movies, like 007.
Shuri-jyo
was built in the 1400’s.
She was a faster swimmer than I was, and she inspired me to practice hard every week.
People often make mistakes, so it is necessary to double check reports.
We practiced throwing, running, and tackling everyday after school.
So,
I agree with Francisco.
Also, I did yoga and swam, like freestyle and breastroke, at the fitness club.
I just took the Academic Discussion 12 writing test. This time, I wanted to organize my essay a little differently (we'll talk about this in class this week). Since this is scored by the AI, I can't be sure that you'll get similar results with the human rater.
Results were typical: 7 minutes, 141 words, 5.0 score.
Forty-four students completed at least four months of TOEFL speaking classes at E4TG in 2023. Four of them have not yet replied to me, so this is based on the 40 whose self-reported data I've got. The mean top TOEFL speaking score was 22.1, and the median was 22. The range was 18~24.
These are, frankly, lower speaking scores than in previous years. I think part of the reason is the new test format. During the ten minute break between the listening and speaking sections prior to August 2023, test-takers could hear what other people were talking about and guess the questions. You can no longer do that.
The mean TOEFL score was 102.85, and the median was 102. The range was 85~112. This is pretty good. Anecdotally, it seems like writing scores were higher, and I'll measure that more precisely next year.
We had two 帰国子女 students in 2023. Their results are not included above.
Many Japanese people have limited range of motion with their mouth and tongue because Japanese has relatively few sounds. So when you speak Japanese, you don't need to smile (for L, S, and æ), put your tongue between your teeth (TH), or move your tongue back (R). Unsurprisingly, these are sounds that Japanese adults struggle with. Here's a good video I recommend to all my students.
Hans did another experiment on ETS's practice academic discussion #2.
This has 120 words, and he deliberately tried to write in generalizations, with little concrete detail. E-rater gave it 4.0.
The content of this essay is deliberately bad. The question was the best way to evaluate teachers. I wrote that the best teachers allow their students to play video games instead of studying. Perfect grammar, dumb content. You can read it for yourself.
155 words, 9 minutes, 5.0.
So you can fool e-rater with nonsense. The AI is not evaluating content, only grammar.
I was scoring essays yesterday and came across this common mistake:
Here's my academic discussion essay for task 11. There's nothing surprising here. 153 words, 6 minutes, 5.0 score. I think I've got a pretty good handle on what the AI is looking for: you need 130+ words with few misspellings and grammar errors for a top score.
This week, one of our questions is about meeting a deadline. Every time we use this question, we get responses like, "I finished my essay before the due."
The mistake here is that the speaker thinks the word "due" is a noun, when it's actually a adjective. So the correct way to express this idea is: "I finished my essay by the due date."
"The essay is due on Friday," has the same grammatical structure as "The man is happy on Friday."
Please use English well!
So I've written essays on the first ten topics that ETS has posted online (link: https://www.ets.org/toefl/ibt-enhancements/prep.html). Here are some results:
This time I took the basic content of the previous task 10 essay and re-wrote it, adding grammar and spelling mistakes. Five minutes, 132 words. I count at least nine grammar mistakes and eight misspellings.
Score: 4.0
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