dear andrea,

                       can you please tell us some differences you meet in teaching IELTS and TOEFL.it's a great pleasure to hear from you.

regards

dr.mangay

moderator for english for specific puposes 

Hey! Being a moderator of this forum, I´ll wait a bit till someone else gives their opinion then give my own. What I can say at this point is that both experiences were great and they made me see EAP in a different light, but the experience of preparing people for IELTS was more compact and student results were better.

cheers

Andrea

hi andrea,

 you are right.eventhough training ielts for academic purposes is quite hard for its heavy syllabus.vaneesa jackman and clara mcdowell as authors of ielts course materials have made the teaching task easier with clear cut model papers needed for ielts test.moreover www.ieltssecret.com is a wonderful link for the ielts tutors.

 wheras toefl  comprises of simple reading,writing,listening and speaking materials.in this regard barrison course materials  and www.free-toefl.org are a relief for teachers.but teaching toefl is complicated than ielts in terms of its confused syllabus structures.what do you think?

regards

dr.mangay 

regards

dr.mangay

Hi Andrea and dr. mangay,

This is an interesting topic to discuss, actually. It is no secret that English teachers are often asked to help with the preparation for these worldwide exams. Based on my experience, it is not always easy to find the suitable textbook for that.  In Russia there are many courses which boast of preparing students for these exams, but not always they are of the best quality though.

In the Far East of Russia TOEFL is more demanded and more popular, that is why it is easier to find textbooks for it. At the same time IELTS is gaining popularity, so the book market has seen more of that lately, though the majority of preparation materials is not authentic what makes them not so efficient.

Personally I find preparation for TOEFL quite different from the methodology of TEFL in Russia, maybe that makes IELTS closer to the teaching of English in my country. Although it does take time to get used to both exams' layout.

Anastasia

P.S. Thank you for the useful links!

Hi Olwyn and everyone. Yes, I had heard about the test but I did not know exactly what it was like. It sounds very interesting.

I do not see exam preparation as cramming or as something negative. If we take washback as the most important thing tests can do for us, which I think it is, there is increased positive washback by examining students´ abilities in each task in a given test, and how these items are trying to show this or that -or fail to show this or that- as regards the way languages are learnt. Peter may´s work is proof of that, of how exam classes can be interesting and not just cramming.

The concept of a unique test sounds interesting though. I would like to see how that works.

 Best

Andrea

Pearson have a lot of information about the new test on their website. Like the ibt TOEFL people, they have tried to bring the writing tasks a bit closer to academic practice, for example by including a summarising question.

From my experience of administering the internet-based TOEFL, one criticism is the very short time given for thinking and speaking - but one argument in favour is that the recordings are rated by a panel of assessors, who do not know each other, or so ETS claim. 

I do tell students that IELTS 'task 2 is a 'strange animal' because they have to write about a topic without having any expert knowledge (unless they get lucky with the question) and yet make it look 'academic'! I do teach them some skills which I hope are transferable to academic writing:

Hedging: 'there seems to be a general trend towards...', 'it has been suggested that...', 'there is evidence that ...'

Reductio ad absurdam (though I don't usually teach the phrase) 'it would be irresponsible if ...' 'one cannot merely assume that ...', 'the consequences of X would be disastrous/counter'productive/unpredictable...' 

Alternating long and short sentences. 

Thinking long and hard before using 'you' eg: 'If you wish to be successful in your professional life, you have to acquire good time management skills' (not very appropriate if the reader is an IELTS examiner!) 

Ways of avoiding redundancy without falling into the trap of 'false synonyms' - I find a lot of students who try to pack words like 'citizens', 'inhabitants', 'residents', 'consumers' etc into their essay in order to avoid using 'people' 15 times. Actually, as you know of course, academic writing tolerates more redundancy than most - I'm thinking of the sciences and law, for example. The solution is often a pronoun or other basic word: 'many', 'some', 'those who'

The best answer to a complex question in Task 2 Writing and in part 3 of the speaking test is usually 'it depends'. That is why they ask candidates 'to what extent do you agree or disagree'. 

Not over-simplifying - if a problem were that easy to solve it would have been solved by now. 

Not just saying 'the government should do X' - which government? Local or national? State or federal? Which countries? 

Leave their prejudices and received opinions outside the test hall. I had one student who, when writing about how parents should share the burden of raising children, 'went off on one' and produced a 350-word rant on why fathers should discipline their families (wife included!) 

From time to time, define terms (without patronising the reader) If the question is vague, pounce on those elements in the question which need to be clarified before any sensible discussion can take place. For example:

'Studying the English language in an English-speaking country is the best but not the only way to learn the language.' Do you agree or disagree with this statement? 

The question doesn't say who the learners are - are they affluent youngsters whose parents can afford to send them to the UK for 3  months? Are they less well-off but hard-working and resourceful 20-somethings who can come to the UK on their own? Are they complete beginners or do they have a sound basic knowledge? Are they keen to learn or not? 

'The position of women in society has changed markedly in the last 20 years. Many of the problems young people now experience, such as juvenile delinquency, arise from the fact that married women now work and are not at home to care for their children. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?' 

Well, for a start the statement is obviously not applicable to any number of countries - in some countries it could be argued that women have less freedom to go to work now than they had in the 1970s. In others, juvenile delinquency hardly exists at all because children are busy working the land, making mud bricks or picking through piles of rubbish to scrape a living. Moreover, the statement presupposes that all mothers are married! It seems to me that if a test-taker is faced with a question like this, s/he is faced with two alternatives - (1) write about the statement as if s/he lived in the UK and shared that social reality ie be a 'good student' and do what seems to be expected of her/him, or (2) disagree with the statement on the grounds that it misrepresents the situation in at least half the globe!  I know which approach I would be inclined to go with.

To sum up, it will indeed be interesting to see how tests of English for academic purposes (if that is what they are) evolve. I do seem to have gone over 250 words, sorry about that!

Hi Dennis, and thank you for all this, so so useful. Yes, I think it´ll be interesting to see how Academic English tests evolve...and I would add how EAP as a whole evolves in fact.

best

Andrea

ielts academic test 2

dear all,

                  sorry for my delayed response as i was busy with my daughter's bedrothal.thanks ollwyn for recommending pearson.let me read and respond.

                  as dennis pointed out few of ielts academic writing part 2 are perplexing and the teachers feel hard to train the intakers for a good band. 

                  anyway practice texts of vanessa jackman and clara mcdowell fit precisely for the teachers an students,what is your opinion about those?have you tried those materials?

regards

dr.mangay