Wednesday, October 1, 2025

November 2025 TOEFL Speaking Class Schedule

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 Here's the schedule for November: Weeknight classes are from 7-10 p.m. Weekend morning classes are 10:00-13:00 and afternoon classes ar...
Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Question from a student

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 A student asked me about factors for language-learning success. Here are ten things off the top of my head: Basic skills like listening and...
Monday, October 14, 2024

Capitalization and Comma Errors

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Here are the answers to the "Common Mistakes" handout this week. Corrections are mostly in red: I saw beautiful coral reefs an...
Saturday, July 6, 2024

Common INT WR Topics

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ETS likes some topics better than others, and one of them is the "vanished civilization." These topics can appear on the reading, ...
Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Academic Discussion task 12

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 I just took the Academic Discussion 12 writing test. This time, I wanted to organize my essay a little differently (we'll talk about th...
Tuesday, December 26, 2023

2023 Year End Results

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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 th...
Monday, November 27, 2023

Mouth Stretching

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Many Japanese people have limited range of motion with their mouth and tongue because Japanese has relatively few sounds. So when you speak ...
Wednesday, August 2, 2023

Academic Discussion #2 (again): another experiment

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 Hans did another experiment on ETS's practice academic discussion #2.  This has 120 words, and he deliberately tried to write in genera...
Monday, July 24, 2023

Academic Discussion 12

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The content of this essay is deliberately bad. The question was the best way to evaluate teachers. I wrote that the best teachers allow thei...
Sunday, July 23, 2023

Mistake of the Day: scores and points

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 I was scoring essays yesterday and came across this common mistake: I got 23 scores on the TOEFL exam. There are two problems here. One is ...

Academic Discussion 11

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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 ...
Saturday, July 22, 2023

Mistake of the Day: Due

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 This week, one of our questions is about meeting a deadline. Every time we use this question, we get responses like, "I finished my es...
Wednesday, July 19, 2023

iBT Academic Discussion Writing Task (a summary)

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 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) ...

Task 10 + grammar errors

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 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 w...

Task 10

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 Here's my task 10 essay. Six minutes to write and two minutes to get the word count down to 132 words. Score: 5.0. So it appears that y...