There are some full-length practice sets in the four practice tests, but those aren’t perfect, either. On the real TOEFL, you definitely need notes, and your preparation should help develop that skill. When the recordings are short, you don’t need notes. Listening to a two-minute lecture then answering two questions is not the same as listening to a five-minute lecture and answering six questions. Similarly, note-taking and memory, two of things that make TOEFL listening difficult, are almost completely irrelevant for those shorter recordings. But by doing that, the Gallagher completely removed TOEFL timing from that practice, and timing is one of the biggest challenges of real TOEFL reading. After all, shorter exercises are easier to incorporate into a class-the teacher has more freedom to use fewer or more questions.
I imagine that the author, Nancy Gallagher, consciously wrote short and fast exercises with just a few questions each. In the sections for reading and listening practice, the texts and recordings are all too short. Let’s start with the biggest problem: length.
#Toefl ibt practice test book full
But it’s still full of small problems that really add up to a much larger quality issue. Delta more accurately represents what TOEFL reading passages look like than Barron’s does, for example. (You can probably tell I’m not a fan of fast food…) That may have been a little too harsh, because there are definitely worse options available. Okay, so the quality of Delta’s practice material isn’t as low as the quality of McDonalds’ food. And I wouldn’t serve McDonald’s to my students if they were trying to improve their health. It could be very convenient for a teacher or tutor to draw from for extra practice material-the organization, price, and straightforwardness of the exercises make for very easy use-but then again, McDonald’s is convenient too. So, similar to Barron’s TOEFL book, Delta may be tempting, but I don’t recommend it for self study. The quality of the material is much more important. Having a lot of practice material doesn’t mean it’s a good book. To put it simply, Delta’s practice material doesn’t accurately mimic the real TOEFL and the challenges it presents. So when I started going through this book and saw how much material it includes for such a low price, I thought, “I wish I’d known about this book sooner!” And then the glow faded as I spent more and more time looking at the material. For details on this, see Magoosh’s tutorial on using older prep for the 2019 TOEFL.)Īlthough I have used practice material from Delta’s book of seven practice tests in classes before, I haven’t used it much, and I’d never used Delta’s Advanced Skill Practice before buying it for this review. Fortunately, older-format books are still very useful in prepping for the current TOEFL. As of this writing, there are no TOEFL prep books that reflect the newest version of the test.
( NOTE: The TOEFL books that Magoosh reviews and recommends reflect the older, pre-August 2019 version of the test. By Lucas Fink on Ma, UPDATED ON December 10, 2020, in TOEFL Prep Materials
0 kommentar(er)
