Teaching the TOEFL Skills 

 


Teaching TOEFL preparation course
Teaching a TOEFL preparation course is one of the most important part of your career as a teacher. Teachers throughout the world generally shudder in fear at the thought of teaching TOEFL. Many first-time TOEFL teachers don't know how to start and what to focus on. However, teaching TOEFL is like teaching anything else except the biggest differences are that you will be emphasizing the structure of the test and dealing with integrated activities. No matter what, with a little bit of preparation and some guidance, any teacher can weave a little magic in the classroom  and become a terrific TOEFL teacher. 

Here are some essential tips for teaching the TOEFL preparation courses: 
1- plan your lesson backwards. Planning your TOEFL class backwards means that you can effectively go through the class, work from the aims, and then work the necessary steps, activities and exercises. 

2- Know your subject. It is a good idea to take few practice TOEFL tests, so that you can get an understanding of how the test is structured. 
3- Manage your time in the classroom and spend most of it on practicing. Don’t be the one who controls the whole class by talking more than your students. In the class, you are just a facilitator who pushes the students to talk and share their ideas and thoughts. 

4- Put your students in groups on the first day and ask them to prepare portfolios of your subject which should be discussed in the fourth week in the classroom. 

5- Try to use a variety of techniques, Materials and activities to keep your students interested in your lesson. Repeating the same technique and using the same materials and tools in the class several times is not recommended as the students get bored. So, designing and creating various activities and using different materials is the key to keep your students engaged and involved in what you are doing. 

6- Bring skill-building, official and test-like exercises to class. Don't waste your time on fill-in-the-blank exercises as they’re much less helpful for a TOEFL class than they are for most other classes.

7- Don't rely completely on general-English class style, but at the same time, don’t forgo it entirely. A good TOEFL class starts with a basis of a general-English classroom, and is then spiced with TOEFL-specific exercises and training.

8- Keep your materials academic-based wherever possible. The majority of the TOEFL is about academic environment, so that’s what your classroom should be, too.

9- Use English Ted talk videos in your class whenever possible and encourage students to discuss them in pairs or groups.

10- Students should be speaking, writing, reading, and listening constantly. That’s key to a good TOEFL classroom, because the TOEFL is all about using the language, not knowing the rules or memorizing vocabulary. 
11- Have your students prepare individual presentations on various topics. The topics should be given to the students before the presenting day in twenty four hours. 
12- Focus on the time aspect.  No matter whether it's reading, listening or grammar; all these are strongly bound by time restrictions. Therefore, students should focus on achieving the structural requirements within the appropriate time limit. 
13- Give your students assignments that should be done within a time limit. Assignment doesn't always need to be TOEFL related. Encourage the students to watch English TV shows, read English language articles and even listen to some online broadcasts.