toefl is terribly difficult, any ideas?

[loveruby]

hey... guys

i have a difficulty in listening to the slangs or idioms the american speak.

paul, i would like to ask u..... in order to do well in toefl listening, do u think we should learn all the slangs or idioms? :?:

also, sometimes the vocabularies in toefl reading seems hard to me. i mean i alwasy get the words wrong no matter how hard i try to read the clues from the text behind it.
I ALWAYS GET THE ANSWER WRONG......

people tell me if i wanna be good on that, i have to know a variety of vocabularies. but sometimes the words we learnt do not always appear in the TOEFL EXAM.....


ur suggestion please.....

[socheat!]

hi...Loveruby!
I support your idea stated that the TOEFL is terribly difficult.
Well, I really admire the students who can get more than 550 scores for the exam, they are very clever anyways!

However, in order to measure each student's knowledge, all the exam must consist of both difficult part and easy part. One exam can't be very difficult from the begining to the end.
Like Paul said:"Remember you dont have to know everything, you just have to know enough to pass, because it is an exam."

In addition, I am also a TOEFL preparation student at the moment, and I find it very difficult to understand about the slang and idiom which appear in the Speaking section the same way as you do. But sometimes I enable to guess some of them, because they are everyday slang or idiom!
In my view, reading or learning about the slang or idiom from a collection books can be useful, but not very effective for every students.
From my own experience, It is a better idea that student should try to listen to the English programmes more , or watching American movies, listen to English radio.... etc.
why?
Well, for example, I learned the new idiom like "be over the moon,hit the roof,bury your head in the sand"something like that from the book in the morning,then I watch the American Movie at night, when I hear the word being spoken again, I not only remember it in my head, but also I can understand its meaning clearer and know in which condition or circumstance that we use it!

Secondly for the vocabularies, one of the members whose name called"asheap" said:
 " 1. The Heinemann TOEFL Preparation Course / Heinemann, M.Kathleen Mahnke & Carolyn B. Duffy
It contains all part of TOEFL test including vocabulary. I like its vocabulrary part which explains how to remember words."

I have not read through the book yet, but I will try soon!

Oh......I also would like to say thank to Asheap for your comment, and especially Paul: Both of you have been providing both practical and good ideas to me!

Finallly, I hope that I will hear from you( loveruby) again that TOEFL isn't terribly difficult, but it is just a piece of cake next time!
Bye....

[YANNAK]

Hey guy....

I guess a lot of other people also have the same problem. Me too! But I think all you should do is to keep practicing. I think that's the only key to success in TOEFL exam.

Guy, you don't have to learn every single word or idiom, that's totally impossible! But you should at least know some of them, which are commonly used in TOEFL. You should also learn how to guess meaning of words from context. That's very very important!  

Good luck.

[Paul Brown (MA CELTA)]

Hey guys,  

 Some great ideas there and I am sure some other students will find the advice from fellow test preppers very helpful indeed. You are right, the idiom is the hardest thing about the listening, and different people have different ways to approach learning them. A very good suggestion made here would be to concentrate on the 'high frequecy idioms' that occur in the test.

 The ETS TOEFL if you are doing CBT is generated from a database of thousands of questions, so it is unlikely you will get a lot of the exact idioms that you find on the practice tests. However, doing practice tests is important part of developing exam skills. It is useful to learn vocabulary for the reading and I personally favour a prefix, root, suffix approach to this as it gives you a more general understanding of how words work in English instead of learning specific words. I favour this approach as I personally have an educational background in Latin and Greek, so I understand it very well.You then have some tools to work with when you are guessing, you will have to guess, it is not possible to know everything!  

As suggested in my other posting about TOEFL and TWE, it is the moving from general English learning into the specific language skills you need to pass the exam, and that usually can only come from an experienced test prepper who has done a lot of research and can show you the high frequency words and idioms which will probably appear. This is why having an experienced guide to help you pass with a score that you are capable of is highly important. Even if you know grammar for the sentence correction, you need to maximise your study time and minimalise wasted time, by learning only what you need to know to pass.

This portal is here to help and thanks for all your support and the 5steps2TOEFL method is under preparation and should be available online by early next year. It is a good idea to prep yourself before you do a course and then you are using your guide only to focus your study into the areas which can really help you on the exam day!  

keep up the good work guys   , some great sharing of ideas here and that is why we are here, for students to help each other and we lalso have well-qualifed English teachers who are also very experienced in the area of English language test prepping. The teaching team which is online with you at www.5steps2ielts.com are currently teaching all over the world and are going to be online with you in the chatroom from early next year as special teaching guests in the room. So keep logging in and stay updated!  

have fun,  :wink:  

Paul

[hmm]

hey... guys

i have a difficulty in listening to the slangs or idioms the american speak.

paul, i would like to ask u..... in order to do well in toefl listening, do u think we should learn all the slangs or idioms? :?:

also, sometimes the vocabularies in toefl reading seems hard to me. i mean i alwasy get the words wrong no matter how hard i try to read the clues from the text behind it.
I ALWAYS GET THE ANSWER WRONG......

people tell me if i wanna be good on that, i have to know a variety of vocabularies. but sometimes the words we learnt do not always appear in the TOEFL EXAM.....


ur suggestion please.....

in my opinion and my friends' opinion, toefl is just difficult but ielt is awfully difficult.

anyway, i dont think they include slang in the exam. idioms? yeah. but slangs, i dont think so.