My TOEFL Experience

Preface

As the exam that has caused me the most anxiety since the gaokao, the TOEFL kept me in the dark for most of 2023, and it is also the exam I invested the most time and money into.

At the start I set a goal of 100 total and 20 in speaking. Along the way I went through countless days of lost confidence, of being drowned by anxiety, of practicing speaking until my tongue tied itself in knots — and finally, on November 3, 2023, I checked my scores and was satisfied.

I write this article both as a summary of my own past and in the hope that it can help anyone who happens to read it.

The sittings I took and my scores:

Study materials I used:

• Vocabulary: MaiMemo
• Listening and speaking practice: TAL Kaomanfen, New Oriental TOEFL, all speaking questions from TPO 1~74 bought on Taobao
• Speaking reference: New Oriental TOEFL Speaking White Paper
• Writing reference: New Oriental TOEFL Writing White Paper, and post-reform all academic-discussion writing real questions and sample essays

Reading

For most Chinese students this is the easiest section, and any competent student from a 211 university or above can certainly handle it with ease.

Before the exam I only did two passages to get used to the pacing, and I scored 27 on my first attempt, then stayed stable, and hit a full score on my fourth attempt. Personally I feel TOEFL reading is even easier than the Jiangsu gaokao or CET-6 reading. Although I memorized a lot of vocabulary before my first exam, that was mostly preparation for the GRE; TOEFL reading itself poses basically no vocabulary challenge.

While a high score isn’t hard, a full score still takes a bit of luck. On the time I scored full marks, the two reading topics were “the early ocean and atmosphere of Earth” and “the agricultural revolution and irrigation,” both topics I was very familiar with. In that case the reading was just easy mode.

Listening

The TOEFL’s bizarre exam format makes listening, speaking, and writing all test your listening ability. But the listening across these three parts is actually completely different:

• The listening section itself:
  • Conversation: relatively hard; everyday conversation has always been my weak spot, with the most linking and elision, and a fairly fast pace;
  • Lecture: moderate difficulty; although it looks long, the pace is actually slow and tolerant of errors, and if you miss a sentence you can completely infer it from context;
• Integrated speaking: the listening here is actually the hardest, as you need to capture as many details as possible and take sufficient notes; my speaking foundation itself was very poor, which made it even harder;
• Integrated writing: the lowest difficulty; at the start you read a passage to get familiar with the topic, and the listening has a rigid structure, clear logic, and a slow pace.

But I have to say, with proper training, the listening section is also very easy to improve and to score high on. I did about 20 days of concentrated, intensive training, plus roughly another 30 days of scattered training (mixed in with other things).

The single most important point about listening is that you must figure out the approach to answering questions that suits you. Many study materials emphasize how to take notes correctly during listening, and at first I trained that way too, but after my first exam I realized this method didn’t suit me — taking notes distracts your attention, and the probability of losing track of the listening content (no longer being able to grasp the logical relationships in the context) increases enormously.

My conclusion is that notes are good for recording details, and the human brain is good for remembering logic.

The pure listening section of the TOEFL actually doesn’t focus on details; instead it tests your overall grasp of the listening material. In my later 20 days of dedicated training I completely abandoned note-taking, and it worked very well. I should note that I later found occasional note-taking still useful when the density of details was high — it helps you avoid losing focus, but what you write down is actually useless; I never once looked at it during the exam. Here, taking notes is really just a way to reinforce the brain’s memory, not a way to store information externally.

The listening training method I used: first pass, do the questions; second pass, re-listen; third pass, listen while reading the transcript; then listen several more times until you can hear every detail clearly. During dedicated training, each listening passage took me roughly 20~40 minutes, and I practiced at least 6 passages a day.

Likewise, topic familiarity greatly affects your performance. On the sitting where I first scored 27, one lecture told the classic story of “winning the Nobel Prize by peeling graphene with tape.” Although I was very familiar with it and breezed through, the content was indeed somewhat specialized, with many physics terms, touching on the layered structure of graphene and the principle of its anisotropic conductivity. Since TOEFL listening lectures are still mainly STEM-oriented, useless knowledge you picked up while slacking off on Zhihu or Bilibili — even some popular science books you read back in secondary school — can help you in unexpected ways; a broad knowledge base lets you achieve more with less effort. But by the same token, unfamiliar topics become very troublesome: on my fourth exam I only scored 24 in listening, precisely because I ran into a literature topic and didn’t understand most of the content.

After the July 2023 reform, listening has a pitfall: since the mid-test break was removed, some people finish faster and start speaking while you are still listening, causing serious interference. Although I did dedicated training before the second exam, I still only got 25 in listening — exactly because I fell into this trap.

The way to avoid this pitfall is to quickly skip all the direction parts and end the reading section two minutes early, so that you can be the first in the room to start speaking, letting others be interfered with by you.

Better that I wrong the world than that the world wrong me.

Speaking

Looking at the scores, you can tell this was the part that tormented me the most — the last two sittings were taken purely for speaking (a speaking score below 20 is very risky when applying).

I did high-intensity dedicated speaking training for about 30 days, and the number of non-dedicated training days is beyond counting.

For someone like me with a very poor speaking foundation, a large amount of training can ensure your score lands around 20; beyond that it still comes down to luck and on-the-spot performance.

TOEFL speaking is less a speaking test than a grand integrated test. For me personally, the reading and listening demands within the speaking section are even higher than in the reading and listening sections themselves:

• The reading parts of task 2 and task 3 require speed-reading ability; personally I feel you can’t manage without 4 words/s, and you won’t get a chance to roll back if you don’t read it through. The reading section, by contrast, can be read at the same speed I normally read papers, and if a sentence isn’t clear you can read it several more times.
• The listening in integrated speaking requires you to write down details, whereas in the listening section much of the time you only need to note the logic. Recording details forces you to rely on notes, and balancing note-taking, receiving information, and grasping the overall logic is the hardest part.

Independent Speaking

Accumulating material is necessary, but quantity is not the point — I only prepared 10 commonly used ones; what matters is being able to use them fluently, so that when you see a question you can quickly react with which material to apply. You can practice this specifically with the Golden 80 Speaking Questions on TAL Kaomanfen.

At the same time, material isn’t a cure-all; independent speaking inevitably carries many random factors and often requires making up a story on the spot. In that case it’s faster to quickly think it through in Chinese and then translate it into English (jot down a few keywords and string them into sentences as you speak).

Integrated Speaking

For me this was the hardest part of the whole exam; getting here basically triggered an adrenaline surge every time.

Handling integrated speaking is the part I spent the most time training on. There is no shortcut; you have to find your own feel and your own experience. Here I’ll share the experience I summarized that worked for me:

• While reading: although task 2 and task 3 give you 45s of reading, it’s best to scan it in just 15s, find the key sentences (skip non-key sentences entirely), and then copy down the key sentences (not necessarily word for word, but as complete as possible — the kind you can read straight off without having to compose anything). The benefit is that during prep time I can quickly read through it once, and when I formally speak I’m not only fluent at the start but also save time;
• While listening: write down as many details as possible, but you must simultaneously filter out the non-essential, and for the essential parts likewise write down keywords/sentences. At the same time, note-taking absolutely must not interfere with receiving the information itself;
• During prep: read out what you’re going to say (don’t say it silently in your head — that gives you the illusion that you already speak it fluently) while circling useful information (or crossing out useless information), use arrows to organize a single thread to follow, and where necessary write filler content between some keywords to reduce the burden of composing on the spot;
• When formally speaking: make fluency your top priority, and when you’re out of time or stuck you can drop some details. Stammering and repeating a sentence not only lowers your score but also wastes time.

No matter the situation, you must never become overly nervous. Being overly nervous slows your thinking and greatly increases stumbling while speaking. On the sitting where I scored 22, I was in a fairly relaxed state during the speaking section.

My personal training method for integrated speaking: first do it normally, then immediately re-speak it, then look at the answer, then keep re-speaking until you can do it very fluently. Under this method one passage takes about 15~30 minutes, and I practiced 10 passages a day.

Writing

No feelings, all formula. In fact I hardly invested any time in writing training; an average English foundation plus appropriate techniques is enough to get at least 22.

One thing to note is don’t let your typing speed drag you down. I’m someone who types fairly slowly and makes a lot of typos, and in the first two sittings this did affect me, but once I got more practiced it was no longer a problem.

Integrated Writing

For integrated writing you can read the passage at a calm, comfortable pace — the time given is enough for you to read it twice — and you don’t need to take notes. The listening is also simple: the reading sets the stage so you’re familiar with the topic, and the structure is rigid, the logic clear, and the pace slow, so writing down the important details isn’t hard.

The thing to watch is don’t memorize templates rigidly; wasting exam time typing out a template isn’t worth it — just keep the logic clear and the structure neat. The time should be spent reconstructing as many details as possible; for language use, gaokao-level vocabulary is enough to get 24.

Academic Discussion Writing

The July 2023 reform removed independent writing and replaced it with academic discussion writing, shortening the time to 10 minutes. My writing score of 19 on the second exam was because I went in carelessly without practicing the new question type at all, and the result was that I completely failed to answer as required.

Later I spent half a day specifically training academic discussion writing and basically got the hang of it. In the exam you really only need to read the professor’s question, skip the pile of filler, then glance at the two student sample answers and find their core viewpoints — this is to avoid colliding with the same viewpoint, and you don’t need to read their specific content fully — after which you can start writing.

My personal template is as follows:

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From my perspective, <my viewpoint>.

Although <pick a sample answer you disagree with and copy down its viewpoint>, <briefly state the advantage of my viewpoint>.

<elaborate in detail, you can use some examples, and you can also point out the shortcomings of the viewpoint you disagree with; 60~70 words is enough>.

<(optional, an expression I personally like) sometimes you can say that my method can actually achieve the goal of the method I disagree with even better>.

So, <summarize the viewpoint>.

Conclusion

Without accumulating small steps, one cannot reach a thousand li.

For me personally, the TOEFL made me reflect on my study patterns since college. My undergraduate courses were either things I was already familiar with or had a foundation in, or things I crammed for right before the exam. A language exam like the TOEFL has no shortcut (unless you’re a language genius); you have to train little by little starting from Day 1, finding your feel and your experience bit by bit. In this process, beyond the obstacle of the questions themselves, there is even more the obstacle of negative emotions, and finding some people you trust and who are also willing to listen, to share your feelings with, is extremely helpful.