TOEFL Listening: How to Practice at Home

that's a great question and if you have more questions let me know uh in the chat and i will get to them as we go but let me get started and i'll start with the introduction my name is josh i'm the head instructor of tst prep and uh what we do is basically help students get their scores quickly and easily as possible studying for the toefl is tough there's a lot of youtube videos a lot of practice a lot of books a lot of things you uh can use if you go to tsc prep we have everything tests teachers everything is there in one place so you don't have to worry about bouncing around the internet trying to find ways to practice if you want to save time and money check out tstprep.com percent off coupon code tsd prep dash friend and uh just to give you an example what you get is that you get practice tests activities practice questions this is a screenshot from my own uh profile check out tsdprep.com for more so let me ask you what do you think is the best way to improve your toefl listening score so let's say for example somebody asks you know they need to improve their score for all the sections let's say that you are um you're studying for the toefl you're studying for the listening you take the test you don't get the score you want and you need to get a better score next time what can you do at home to help you get a better score what do you think what do you think is the best way to do it um some people think i'll give you some popular advice that i hear some people think you know i should do a lot of practice tests some people think i should hire a teacher some people think i should go to back to school some people think i should uh buy more books and study more at home these aren't this is not uh none of these are bad ideas um the the problem is that they're not very specific and they're not very actionable so what i want to do is give you things that you can actually take and do at home today so you know exactly what you have to do today i'm not going to just tell you take a bunch of practice tests some people say buy ets book the people who make the toefl now if you ask this question how do you improve your toefl listening to ets this is what their book says the best way to improve your listening skills is to listen frequently to many different types of material and various subject areas sciences social science arts business and others the internet is also a great resource for listening material now uh the reason i included this is because a lot of people say buy the book from ets it will give you some practice it'll have a couple practice tests in there but it doesn't give you very good advice on how to improve the internet is a great resource i mean did you need to buy a book to tell you that the internet is a good resource i know this book is from 2017 it's a little bit dated but my point is that uh just buying a book or just listening to ets or you know just following certain advice is not always so helpful because it's too general you don't know what to do okay so i have to listen to a lot of things in science and math and business art okay what am i supposed to do with that so what we're going to do is we're going to focus on doing very specific things okay so that's the goal here is for you to have specific activities that you can do today right after we talk okay and i'm going to give you some websites some free some paid that you can use to help you practice all right so here's the presentation outline we're going to talk about just a quick overview of the listening section four ways to help you practice with or without tests and to set up a study schedule show you how to do that all right so let's first i'm going to go through the listening really quickly i'm going to assume you kind of know about the listening already for the toefl ibt and then i'm going to check the chat see what questions come up and then we'll move on to the next part okay so write some questions in the chat now and i'll get to them in a couple minutes so the listening section changed um in uh august of 2019 there's five passages five to six questions depending on if it's a conversation or lecture it's about 40 minutes if you get an extended version of the test this means you have some an extra part it means you'll have seven passages and it'll take a little bit longer to take up another 16 minutes and the clock starts when you answer questions so that one thing that's a little hard to talk about for the listening is time management because it's a little different like in the reading the clock is just ticking when the reading passage starts right uh in the listening the clock starts ticking when the questions come and the question comes after you listen so time management is not usually an issue for people for the toefl listening because after you listen to the passage you see the question and either you know the answer you don't you know either you heard the answer while you were listening or you didn't hear it so it's usually not time management is usually not a big deal for the toefl listening i know this is kind of small but i wanted to show some just an overview of what the listening section looks like part one you have three passages a cut a conversation in two lectures usually conversations are followed by five questions lectures followed by six questions and part two the shorter part will be just one conversation in one lecture and if you get an extended test for the toefl ibt which you'll either get an extended reading or an extended listening it's one of the two if you do get that then it'll be an extra two passages as well when you listen uh the conversation will look something like this there's a picture and then there's a timer that's that's kind of going uh that that shows you how much how much more time is left in the audio when you listen to a academic lecture look something like this they give you some important words here like echolocation if you don't know what echolocation is don't worry just listen to the lecture listen to the story and focus on that and this bar will show you how much time is left and then when the questions come up one question at a time uh there's no next but button you can't skip questions you have to answer each one one at a time so just answer it and move on you can't go back so if you don't know the answer you just have to take a guess to the best of your ability don't take too much time you don't want to run out of time but that's that and so these qu just so you know the topics they're typical of what you would expect on a university campus so the conversations are usually between a professor and a student a a resident advisor and a student that's somebody who works in the dormitory there's a couple different people that work on campus that might be included in the conversation so as a student and some type of campus worker and they're all academic so even though the lectures everything is academic here everything is university college stuff the lectures they'll be about one of these topics this is from etsy's toefl book arts life science physical science social science so any any of these topics could be in the listening some students often ask you know what if i don't know about a topic you know what if i don't know about it what if i don't know for example about viruses or you know architecture in theory the passages cover a variety of subjects don't worry if you're unfamiliar all the information is needed needed to answer the questions is in the passage so according to ets it's okay if you don't know about the topic because it's checking your english ability and not your ability to answer questions about a certain subject i do think that you know personally speaking like i'm better at humanities at things that are that have to do with history literature i'm not as great with things that have to do with science like biology and chemistry so i do find it more difficult to follow biology and chemistry passages than it is to follow something in humanities so i do think that there is an element of luck if you get a passage that is kind of easy for you is about a topic you know about but again in theory this shouldn't matter it's measuring your english ability and not your ability to know about a subject there are a bunch of different question types i'm not going to talk about the question types too much here and the reason is because i think that some books and and teachers focus too much on question types and also we're talking about how to study at home uh so it doesn't really fit this lecture but just to give you a general idea uh these are just content and just purpose this this is these two questions one of them is always the first question after you listen to a passage basically just means the kind of main idea like what is this about detail is the most common which is just a general fact you know what what did they say and so on understanding the speaker's attitude this this is one of the trickier questions like how does the professor feel um so a lot of these questions they will replay part of the audio and you have to guess based on like tone of voice and how people are feeling and then we have a function inference again those are more of the more difficult questions where you have to kind of take a guess of what something means organization and connecting content these are like tables i'm sorry connecting content is is usually a table and understanding organization is you know why does the professor say this first or you know why does this come before this so that's connecting con i'm sorry that's understanding organization those are the eight question types again i'm not going to talk about them in too much detail we have courses on tst prep if you want to know a lot about them for the most part i usually don't recommend students taking too much time focusing on question types i focus more on strategy and usually you can answer the questions if you have good strategy but if there's some question types like for example inference that really uh that are really difficult for you then you might want to focus on them by the way next week i'm going to plug next week's live lesson i'm doing everything about inference questions for the reading so if you have trouble with inference questions check out next week's live i'll be talking about that okay so i'm going to get to the next part four ways to practice that test but let me get into some questions here first and see uh if any if i can help answer a couple things here i saw some people writing uh while i was talking so uh so somebody said start listening as much as we can in english is the best way to improve you know that this idea of surrounding yourself with english immersing yourself with english is definitely helpful um is definitely something that you uh should be doing to help you improve uh because if you're thinking in english and you're surrounding yourself just you're going to pick up more stuff so that does help it's definitely helpful and i do recommend that the only problem i have with that is that it's just not specific like if i'm a student i'm thinking like okay so i'm going to surround myself in english or in japanese i study japanese so i'm going to surround myself in japanese but like what can i do to actually improve uh like yeah i i might improve in general but it's kind of hard to measure i want something a little bit if i can try to find something that i can measure uh okay so improve your note taking so i will have a if you're if you're worried about note-taking i will have a separate lecture on note-taking i actually have a video i believe on youtube about note-taking that you can check out i won't talk about notes too much here today i'm focusing more on activities that you can do at home uh so mariana brings up a good point that i'm going to bring up is that that you can listen to the same thing again and again so yeah doing the same practice test more than once listening to the same podcast or the same audio file more than once is definitely a good way to practice a lot of times like for me for example i watch a movie once or a tv show once i don't really want to watch it again unless you know there's some movies that i really like that i've watched multiple times same thing with tv shows i think there's might be one or two tv shows that i've watched more than once so we kind of don't like to do something more than once like we want a new experience right you know i've done this already so i want a new experience or when you're studying i've learned this already so i don't need to learn it again but actually reviewing is one of the keys to learning and to retaining the information so going back and doing the same practice test same question it's definitely something that you should do and we'll talk about that so it's a great piece of advice thank you mariana um from so yeah somebody said that they bought some tests from ets wasn't so helpful i mean some tests are really helpful i would just say that the advice for how to improve is not so helpful so the tests are great and they're great practice just the advice i think is just not so helpful is too general um somebody says they're listening to english podcasts and ted talks yes that's the you should be doing that that's good um okay let's see okay so somebody asked a question like can i do well on the listening section of the toefl if i don't understand like movies or tv shows in general i'm going to give you some advice and i'm going to give you some techniques to help you practice at home to help you improve no matter if you're at like a 15 or a 25 or 30 a toefl list well 30 you can't improve anymore but 15 or 25 at toefl listening so any anybody at any level can do this but i will say that if you don't have certain english skills if you're listening to a toefl listing passage and you understand let's say less than 80 percent of it it's going to be really hard to get score higher than 20. you need to understand what you're hearing if you don't understand what you're listening to it's going to be pretty tough to do well and so i would say that you know when you're practicing at home you want to make sure you're practicing with things that you understand at least 80 percent of or at least that you enjoy enjoyment you know if you enjoy what you're doing then you can do it forever you know so so if you enjoy it it's great i don't know if you're going to enjoy doing toefl listening so much but enjoy what you're doing is is really the key but if you really don't understand a lot of the listing it's going to be hard to get a really high score for toefl listening um okay so let's see here i'm going to ask one more question then go back to the presentation here um yeah so somebody said yeah if you don't understand what you're hearing no tips no tricks will help yeah uh yeah if you don't understand what you're listening you can't answer the question i mean it's it you know so i'm gonna give you uh ways to practice at home but if you don't understand it i mean it's you can't do you can't do anything about it uh you're gonna have to understand what you're listening to so you want to practice in a way where you uh are improving and understand what you're doing so uh let me get back to this here so how do we practice without tessa and keep asking questions in the chat i'll get back to them i try to answer all them i love interacting with you guys i i miss the classroom so uh this is the closest thing i get to it so please uh please ask questions and i'll get to get to what you're asking um okay so how to practice let's get to it the first way to practice is to use shorter passages the passages for toefl listening are pretty long um they are let's see here they're about uh let me let me think about this for a second they're about four or five minutes long depending on if you're listening to a conversation conversation might be three minutes but usually about four and the passages are at least four minutes that's a really long time to only listen so you want to practice with shorter passages ideally a minute or less and the main resource i'm going to recommend actually is our video on youtube which is the free video on 100 short listening passages um that includes uh that there's two videos for that there's 50 questions in each it'll take you it's two hours so it's a lot of stuff in our uh paid stuff we have 500 of these questions so we have a lot more uh but you can see kind of um the the reason why you should do shorter passages is because it'll help you focus on what you don't understand so for example in in these two videos you'll listen to astronomy topics about astronomy you'll listen to topics about history you'll listen to topics about arts about business and so you'll get to hear a lot of different academic topics so when you get to hear a lot of different academic topics it helps you kind of get used to what you're going to listen to on the test so it has a lot of different topics and also it's only about a minute or two long each passage focus is a big problem for a lot of people it's a problem for me like like listening to a toefl passage for five minutes is not an enjoyable experience and it's hard to focus on it one way to help you focus is to take notes of course and to have a goal before you listen for example i want to write down 10 lines of notes i want to find two important details i wanted i want to find what the main idea is of this talk you know having some goals will help you focus but really you know kind of getting used to the academic lectures and doing shorter passages will help build your skills and help build your build your tolerance for longer passages so if you're having trouble focusing definitely start with shorter passages answer one or two questions about them and then move on i'm going to show you another uh another resource that you can use to do this as well and it ties into my next way to practice at home which is to practice with interesting academic content so uh if you're interested in what you're learning about this is uh the this is the the kind of the the golden ticket or i don't know whatever you want to say the magic the secret whatever is to really enjoy what you're doing if you enjoy what you're doing enjoy what you're learning you can do it for a lot longer the best example that i could think of is ted ed now you can also use ted ed to help you practice with shorter passages as well just like the the second way so practicing with shorter passages you can use tst prep stuff you can also use ted ed's stuff as well and i brought up an example here and let me get it let me get it up here yeah okay um so with this uh with this example here like does stress cause pimples so i'm interested in this i'm i'm an old man but i still get pimples pimples so i want to know about this a little bit more um and so i can watch this it's only three minutes long uh but it's interesting to me i'm interested in pimples and about does this uh you know what could i do to help not have them like this poor kid here but you know besides watching a video which is not so actionable which you can't really do a whole lot with it they also have on ted ed they have questions that come after it okay they so they have these questions here that you can fill in which are asking you if you understood the um if you understood the video what you heard and what you watched so this is a more interesting way to learn about something that's kind of academic you know why you're getting pimples and also interesting and then also shorter you know you could do three minutes four minutes five minutes but it's it's it's still long but uh at least it's in video format it has some animation that's kind of cool right um and then you can answer these questions and you know these this is kind of like a biological uh topic so you can learn some interesting words and phrases for about biology i mean i don't know what some of this stuff is i know this is pretty small here but somebody please help me with the pronunciation sebaceous i don't i don't know i'm saying it wrong uh sebaceous glands uh adrenal glands or pineal glands but i've never heard of cebasis so okay whatever so you can use this resource you can use ted ed to help you uh with finding academic topic that's interesting i mean it's really endless the amount of topics they have i wonder if i can go back to the uh discover page here without breaking anything um yeah i mean you could go there's just so much stuff and then you can filter it based on the subject that you're interested in as well so this resource is really amazing because not only are the topics academic but also they ask questions after so that that kind of combination of the two is really a great a great way to help you practice so you might want to set a target like i'm gonna watch two ted-ed videos and take notes about them or i'm gonna watch two ted ed videos and try to answer eighty percent of the questions correctly you know something like that having some goal in mind that you're going to do with these ted ed videos is really helpful this is an incredible resource it really really is because it it gives you academic topics but also in an interesting way so definitely check that out highly recommended ted ed let me go back to my uh main presentation here um that one sec yeah okay um okay so yeah so then and they also ask you questions afterwards so you can definitely check it out uh one thing that i would recommend and i forgot to mention is that once you're kind of used to the videos or if you feel comfortable try to listen only so you know put your face away from the computer screen or whatever you want to do so you only listen you can practice taking notes and only listening to the topic and then do it so yeah you want to make sure that you practice like how it's going to be on the toefl with listening so you can mix it up you know you can do one with the video you get to watch it one without the video you don't watch it you just listen and then you write notes so either one is okay you really don't need the videos for these topics you can mostly just listen to them okay so that's the second way and the second way to uh second website so so far we have use shorter passages practice with interesting content tst prep ted ed the third way we're going to talk about is to do something called listen and type it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like is that you listen to a passage and then you type it out i wanted to do an example together so this is from tsc prep we have a bunch of them you can also practice with some i'm going to give you some other ways to practice as well but so let me change my screen here and i'm going to show you uh what this looks like for uh tst prep and um and hopefully you can get some ideas of how to practice this as well so let me transition here okay so what i'm going to do basically here is that i'm going to listen to this uh audio file and i'm going to type what i hear okay and what i recommend is listening more than once you're going to listen three times and try to type everything you hear this is pretty difficult actually uh at tsd prep we made it difficult on purpose you can make it easier you can do this with the ted ed resource for example you can do it with movies that you're watching you just listen and try to type what you hear okay so you can do this with a lot of different things but you want to make it short something that's less than 30 seconds so just for less than 30 seconds listen to something listen up to three times and try to type what you hear let's do an example together i'm going to do this right now okay here we go and you can do it with me uh maybe you want to pause the video or yeah i'm going to be typing so you're going to see what i wrote so just close your eyes um okay here we go astronomy is defined as the study of the objects that lie beyond our planet earth and the processes by which these objects interact with one another we will see though that it is much more it is also humanity's attempt to organize what we learn into a clear history of the universe from the instant of its birth in the big bang to the present moment okay so uh if you see i would turn spell check off by the way i have spell check on here um i wonder what's wrong with this but anyway okay so and also i put these little dots here because i missed whatever came after so the second time i'm going to listen i'm going to listen for these dots again now again this is pretty difficult don't worry if you're thinking like wow this is very hard that's pretty normal um again this is purposely pretty difficult um so you can do this at different you can take this idea and do it in a lot of different ways you can do it with just one sentence you can do it with movies you like you can do it with ted ed lots of different ways to do this so i'm just doing this as an example let's listen to it again let me try to do better this time or let me try to fill in the blanks astronomy is defined as the study of the objects that lie beyond our planet earth and the processes by which these objects interact with one another we will see though that it is much more it is also humanity's attempt to organize what we learn into a clear history of the universe from the instant of its birth in the big bang to the present moment so even i'm having some trouble with this this is this is quite a lot to write okay i don't know if i'm gonna get it this third time i missed a couple things uh let's see how it goes okay let's try one more time that's pretty hard uh let's try this one more time see if i can do this astronomy is defined as the study of the objects that lie beyond our planet earth and the processes by which these objects interact with one another we will see though that it is much more it is also humanity's attempt to organize what we learn into a clear history of the universe from the instant of its birth in the big bang to the present moment from the big bang to the present moment yeah there i'm i'm missing a couple things uh you guys can correct me uh later uh we learned we learned to a i messed something up okay so i could check my answer here and see uh see what it's supposed to be um it's defined as the study that lied beyond our planet earth and the processes by which these objects interact with one another not each other we will see though don't worry about commas or anything like that that is much more it is also humanity's attempt to organize what we learn into a clear history we learn into a clear history of the universe from the instant of its birth to the basically that's what i missed at the end so it's challenge right i mean it's even a challenge for me the and the reason we make it more difficult is because we're trying to get you prepared for the test and a good kind of piece of advice is that you want to practice with things that are more difficult now why should and let me rephrase that you want to practice the things that are more difficult as long as it's not too stressful if it's really if this is really stressful for you definitely make it easier the reason why you want to make it a little more difficult if it's not too stressful for you is because on test day you'll be ready for anything since you practiced with things that were really hard you'll be ready for anything of course you don't have to do this on the test you don't have to listen and type this is just kind of getting you used to the way people speak the music of the way that they speak and also you can identify some words and phrases that might be a little difficult for you but again you want to make it less than 30 seconds this is about 25 seconds and as you can tell it's pretty long right you can make it a lot less than this and i think it's a great way to help you improve listen and type we also have practice for duolingo english tests that's a bit shorter and simpler than this but because that's a question type on the duolingo english test so yeah so we so we have practice for you but you can do that with anything i mean you could take this idea and you could practice it with any material that you're interested in and that you like so keep that in mind all right let me get back to my presentation here and uh yeah i have a couple of sites that i'm going to recommend one site is scientific american which they have these kind of short podcasts that you can that you can use to help you practice these short podcasts are you know maybe one minute long so they're a short kind of academic text similar to ted talks but shorter and they do have like ted talk style stuff too that you can use but you don't have to do that you basically i just recommend using some of their shorter stuff to help you practice another site that i'm going to try to bring up here i don't know if i can or not let's see if i can let's see if i can get this working um okay let's see if this works uh i'll give you one second okay go this okay yeah it's gonna be okay maybe that works okay it's gonna be slightly cut off but this is another site like dive i'll link all these sites in the chat by the way this is a newer site that i'm a part of and basically you can take any subtitled youtube video and use it to practice so you don't just have to do ted ed you can do anything that you like this is just some random video and what i can do is that i can play it and then i can write in what i hear so let's look at this example all right let me show you a trick back up back up okay vanishing deck that was hard to hear but i think it was vanishing deck okay what's this got a straight jacket here eric a straight jacket here you got a straight jacket you've never in your life now you probably heard that but uh this is going to be i'm going to spell it wrong never and then i'll tell you what the correct answer is i've attempted a straight jacket so anything like this too where you can kind of fill in the blanks um is another great way for you to practice that's the lying dive and i'll put a link in the chat as well okay let me get back to this here um okay so that's that that's that now before i show the fourth way to practice uh actually let me show the fourth way and then i'll get to your questions if you have a question put in the chat i'll answer it after i do this fourth uh question here or fourth way to practice is to practice more than once yeah so i said this already is that you want to do the same thing more than once and the reason is because you want to review what you've learned through the review process you'll realize you'll remember what you've learned and you'll also find some missing things that you didn't notice before really really review usually i recommend students go back to the same thing about a week later and the reason that you want to go about a week later is because you want to give enough time between study sessions and you want to focus on some of the things that you forgot because there will be things that you forgot so about a week later i usually recommend doing the same review when i talk to students about how to practice at home i sometimes ask them i know this is kind of small but what do you think is the most effective way to practice is it to finish an entire test at one time and grade yourself which is what most people do do one test per day every day before the test or to complete a single passage explain your answers check your answers make a plan to avoid the same mistake again and i think most of you sorry i know i'm going a little fast here but i think most of you know the answer is c that the more time you spend on a practice whatever it is the better you will get at it the more you will improve now you don't need me to tell you this i think everybody kind of knows this it's just hard to do by yourself it's hard to do this kind of thing by yourself usually you need a teacher or somebody to tell you what to do because it's hard to give yourself a kind of self-discipline to do the same thing more than once it's just not that much fun it's not that much it's not very interesting sometimes it doesn't feel like it's helpful but you want to do the same thing more than once you want to practice make a plan all that good stuff okay now i'm going to get into setting up your study schedule show you how to do that i know it sounds like something really simple and easy but it's actually a little bit more complicated than you might think and you're going to get some good ideas about how to by the way why this is important because a lot of students don't plan their study schedule they just say like okay i'm going to study today probably after work after work comes okay what am i going to study it takes 30 minutes to just figure out what you're going to study and then once you start studying you're tired take a nap i'm going to take a nap and i'm going to come back and start studying again take a nap come back start studying okay what do i need to focus on and you've lost an hour so we're going to set up a study schedule so you don't lose that time but let me go to the chat let me see what questions you have and i will get back to the last part of the presentation so let's see here um uh okay so let's see okay so somebody asked for things that are uh other sources besides said maybe similar to toefl test practice i gave the scientific american example as well anything that's similar to toefl will be from a uh a an english test provider you know ielts or toefl those would be similar tests or duolingo even um so i mean tsd prep is really what i would recommend for toefl is our stuff of course but and ted has similar questions on ted ed which is why i like it but the only other place i could think of is like a it's like an academic textbook like you know if you're gonna go to college like a biology 101 textbook um there's not really any reason for any company or any business or any school to make this unless they're preparing people for tests um so yeah i i would say i would say try to go tfc prepper ted i mean because ted has the questions after it's really the best one there's so many videos it's really crazy uh or you know of course lying dive any youtube video you can take any youtube video and turn it into a practice and i showed you how to do that with listen and type you can take any youtube video and turn it into practice um okay let's do something like this so one person has some advice that when it comes to focus they they try to feel excited to listen to an audio i feel i understand much more and i'm excited about it so thank you luis this is a great uh point is that he tries to get excited about what he's going to listen to like wow i can't wait to listen to this toefl listening passage i don't know what it's going to be about but it's going to be fun uh if you can do that great i'm not so good at that personally i guess i could be better at that but uh really i i find it's hard to kind of make myself excited you know it's kind of like the environment and the toefl environment is not an exciting environment for me but uh but yes so it's exciting to teach i guess you would try to trick your brain into thinking that you're doing something that you really enjoy and so you know i like teaching so if i'm if i'm teaching about something you know no matter what the topic like toefl is a pretty dry topic but i i like teaching and so i get i get excited hopefully you guys can feel a little bit of energy when i'm when i'm talking about this stuff so yeah trying to find ways to tap into that energy any way that you can would be great so that's good advice louise some hg is looking for somebody to talk in english somebody asked about the app's name i think uh there's whatsapp i'm sorry not what's up um langdive was was the one that i uh showed before that's a new site um so it's a little rough around the edges um is there a typing speed contest uh yeah no yeah sorry um are you able to use spell check no yeah good question there's no spell check in the toefl definitely don't use spell check when you're practicing um uh so somebody mentioned that bbc podcast has a similar uh model to ted so definitely check out the bbc and let me know if anybody knows that uh link please put it in the chat so put in the chat and see if that uh if that is the same thing um and so yeah i'm going to talk about notes in a separate lecture so i won't i won't do it here okay let me get back to my presentation i'm going to finish up setting up your schedule a couple more minutes it won't take too long and then i'll answer any final questions please put them in the chat now and i'll answer anything that's left okay so here we go this is how you set up your schedule it's important it's important because you're going to waste time if you don't set up a schedule so how do you do that first thing you do is pick a test date it's okay if you don't have an exact date yet picking an exact date is actually a little bit better because it will help you kind of focus on a specific goal like for example i'm taking my what's called n3 japanese proficiency test on december 5th so right now i'm just thinking about december 5th and that day and what i have to do before that i don't think i'm ready i i have a lot of work to do before that but i've picked a date i settled on it um and so yeah i would pick a date and and make that kind of your focus it'll really help you the second thing is to gather your resources so figure out all of the resources you're going to use to help you study the books the website so you know what are your resources what do you have to help you practice do you have a teacher that you're going to that's going to be part of your schedule do you have practice tests that you bought from a book or from a website are there certain videos that have practice so i gave a bunch of resources already like tsc preps youtube videos for short reading and listening passages also we have practice tests if you're on our site you have these types of practice but what are some other practice that you have that you can use to help you study it doesn't want to be all toefl you want to try to build your skills as well um talk about you know plan ted ed what am i what videos am i going to watch from here scientific american what are the the audio files that i'm going to listen to for this they come with a transcript as well so it's a good for listen and type you can listen and type out what you hear or you have like lang dev there's some videos on youtube that you want to put here and you want to practice uh filling in the blank here with line dive gather your resources figure out all the stuff that you have and then use that to say okay on monday i'm going to do this on tuesday i'm going to do this on wednesday i'm going to do this so you have all these resources pick a time and place to study so why is this important it's important because most of us live at home you know we have a family and we have rooms that we usually do other things besides study for the toefl you know i usually watch tv in the living room i usually uh surf the internet in my my own room you know so it's hard to kind of do things outside of my office so like my office my brain is kind of like okay office time this is the time to make toefl stuff you know and all that that kind of thing um so you know that my brain kind of knows okay i need to go into this mode um figure out what place where you're going to study so you can get okay this is when i'm gonna study toefl i'm here this is the room where i do it it's not the room where i surf the internet you know it's hard to kind of study on your phone because your phone is used for so many different things you have notifications going off so i wouldn't recommend using your phone so that's a place to you know the screen that you use is a place so pick a good time and place to study okay all pretty simple stuff you know none of this is is too earth shattering i think you know most of the stuff already but maybe you don't think about it for toefl because a lot of people i talk to they just want to get their score and move on with their life so they're just trying to hurry through it but if you just take a little bit of time set up a schedule to really help this the fourth thing is to plan out your week basically what i recommend is that students take sunday to plan out monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday and saturday if they're going to study saturday i got this idea from people who diet the biggest problem with diets is that lunch is actually the biggest problem is that you know lunch the people uh usually don't eat very healthy try to eat quickly because they have to go back to work um so what some people do for diet is that they prepare all their meals on sunday mondays lunch tuesdays lunch wednesdays lunch they prepare everything on sunday and have everything in a container in the refrigerator so monday they can just take it out and they don't have to think about it you want to do the same thing for the toefl because you don't want to sit down at your desk and think okay what am i going to study today you don't want to think that because that takes time to figure out and also you'll probably start thinking about other things like oh i wonder if somebody commented on my facebook post uh you know and and i i wonder if i got this email i'd i do it so you know these are natural things if you write down what you're going to study it'll help save time because you won't be thinking like oh what am i supposed to do this is an example of somebody who is in like private lessons they get a schedule and they can figure out okay monday i'm going to do this from from score builder tuesday i'm going to do this for practice questions wednesday i'm going to do this for practice tests so you know figure out what you're going to do each day you don't have to do practice tests every day hopefully you have some ideas and some activities that you can use to practice on your own from this little lecture here yeah and the last thing is to just adjust based on experience so if last week uh you decided that you were going to study with your friend but your friend was unreliable they couldn't meet you at the time that you needed okay so you have to change that next week so basically you know make a plan and then be flexible you know maybe you st you most people i know who's to decide to study for the toefl plan on studying too long actually a lot of people say i'm gonna not study on monday or tuesday or wednesday i'm gonna study eight hours on thursday not a good idea do a little bit every day i would focus on an hour every day at first make increase it if it's okay if like you do fine you know with uh with doing just an hour a day and you can feel like you can do more increase it if you can most of the time students give say too much i'm going to study four hours a day every day it's too much i don't want to do that you know you don't want to do that um so change based on what happens okay and again you know you can get all this stuff at tsdprep.com 10 off to code tsc prep dash friend and you can save a lot of time and energy everything that you need in one place so definitely check that out i'll put a link in the description below but that is it i'm going to uh see what questions are in the chat and see if anybody uh wants to ask anything and i will get into it so let's see here how to get the the detail the key sentence of the lecture so yeah this is one piece of advice that i hear a lot of teachers give is that you want to find the main idea of the lecture and usually it's in the first minute of the lecture this is the idea is similar to when you're writing that you have a kind of thesis sentence a kind of main idea sentence that and the toefl they'll have the same thing in the listening in general this is a bad idea i think it's a bad piece of advice because basic which you this is your main goal when you listen you want to understand the passage that's your main goal when you're thinking about i need to find the key sentence you're focused on the wrong thing and it it drives me crazy when i hear other teachers say it because it's you want to understand what you're listening i don't listen and think i need to find the key sentence i think like i need to understand as much as possible that should be your goal and so don't and sometimes there's not even a key sentence they don't this is not a written assignment they don't give a thesis sometimes they speak for one thing about a minute and then the topic the main idea kind of changes in the middle so you got to be careful about that stuff focusing on a main idea for the listening a thesis sentence is in my opinion a bad piece of advice but i hear a lot of people say it

Channel: TST Prep TOEFL

Views: 5,950

Keywords: TOEFL iBT Listening, TOEFL Listening, TOEFL Listening practice

Id: IPZaRDfATv4

Length: 49min 7sec (2947 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021