The TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) is a standardized test that measures the English language proficiency of the non-native English speakers who wish to enroll in an English speaking university.
Moreover, this test is accepted by various English-speaking academic and professional institutions all over the world. The test is given in English and is administered via the internet.
The TOEFL test lengths about 3 hours with 4 sections in total- Speaking and Writing, Listening, and Reading.
In this article, let’s dive deep into the four sections of the TOEFL test.
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1. TOEFL Speaking and Writing
The TOEFL Speaking and Writing sections are designed to assess your ability to spoken English and writing.
This section makes up the other half of the whole test and important as the listening and reading sections.
Unlike the listening and reading sections of TOEFL, the speaking and writing sections are graded by a TOEFL certified test scorers and not entirely done through an online interface.
TOEFL Speaking
The speaking section in TOEFL contains six tasks. Two of these speaking tasks will be independent tasks. You will get a prompt and expected to give your option about the given topic.
The remaining four tasks of the TOEFL speaking section are integrated. This means the tasks are connected to an academic course’s content or about a specific campus situation. Tasks 3 and 4 will have a reading passage that you have to read and answer the questions given.
The tasks 5 and 6 will be listening to a prompt and responding to the given audio prompt.
TOEFL Writing
The writing section of the TOEFL exam lasts for 50 minutes in which you have to plan and write the two tasks provided. The integrated task should take you 20 minutes to write, while the individual task takes 30 minutes.
Moreover, these sections are scored based on the particular TOEFL writing score system. Usually, the raters will provide you with a score between 0 and 5.
2. TOEFL Listening
The listening is the second section of the TOEFL test. It assesses your understanding of spoken English and your ability to answer the lectures and conversations you hear.
The TOEFL listening section comprises of two conversations and four lectures in a university setting. Moreover, some include an extra unscored conversation or two extra unscored lectures.
You will have 20 minutes to complete the task. However, this does not include the time you spend on listening to conversations and lectures. Of course, individual questions have no time limit. There is no time limit to answer individual questions.
Remember that you have to complete this Listening section in about 60-90 minutes.
3. TOEFL Reading
The reading section in TOEFL is designed to assess your ability in comprehending academic reading material.
It includes passages from university textbooks and fields of study from chemistry to psychology and literature. On average, the length of each passage is about 700 words.
Typically you will have 3 reading passages which will have 10 questions that you need to answer for each passage. Each passage is timed separately. If you get 3 passages, the total time allowed is 54 minutes. The reading section can have up to 4 passages with a total of 40 questions with a total time of 72 minutes.
There are 10 types of TOEFL reading questions with four kinds of formats. Most question types are worth 30-40 questions with a scale of maximum 30.
The TOEFL reading question types:
- Inference Question
- Vocabulary Question
- Reference Question
- Purpose Question
- Detail (Factual Information) Question
- Negative Factual Information Question
- Essential Information (Sentence Simplification) Question
- Sentence Insertion (Insert Text) Question
- Complete the Summary (Prose Summary) Question
- Complete the Table (Fill in a Table) Question
Hence, these are the four modules of the TOEFL exam. Let’s have a deep understanding of each of these modules in the coming articles.
If you are unaware of the test format and details, then contact our expert counselors and plan your TOEFL test prep accordingly.
