TOEFL An Essential Tool For Overseas Education

TOEFL(Test Of English as a Foreign Language) is conducting to assess the English fluency of the students from non-English speaking countries to get admission in the foreign universities. The test evaluates the reading, writing, listening and speaking abilities of the test-taker.

The TOEFL exam is relied by over 6000 universities, colleges, business and professional schools of around 140 countries. The test is conducted by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which is a registered trademark for the test administered since 1964. It keeps the provision of sending the test scores to four universities of the student’s choice. In India, the fee for TOEFL test is US$165, which includes the cost of the score report and four score recipient universities cost.

TOEFL-iBT for Indian Students:
TOEFL-iBT (Internet Based Test) was launched in the year 2005 and was commenced from 2006 in India. It is intended to restore the precious two versions of the test and is gradually becoming available worldwide. In India, TOEFL is offered as an Internet-based Test, which is a linear and not a computer adaptive test. Here the test takers will answer all the questions from the same range of difficulty, rather than receiving questions based on their ability levels.

In a TOEFL iBT, students have to take an online test directly from the ETS test centers. There will be approximately 45 test sessions a year, usually on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. TOEFL-iBT is an integration of assessing four different skills for English language - reading, writing, listening and speaking.

To succeed in this new format, students need to be good note takers as they will be required to read passages and then listen to lectures or long conversations in order to respond either orally or by writing to questions, usually about how the written material relates to the listening material. The language skills of gist, details, inferences, vocabulary, reference, and insertion are still tested along with the new skills of paraphrasing and determining overall organization and purpose. The addition of these new skills, along with the integration of the sections, makes the TOEFL-iBT a more valid evaluation of a student’s real-life language skills and their ability to succeed in a real academic environment.