1 Overview
TOEFL writing section consists of two parts: an Integrated Writing Task and an Academic Discussion Writing Task. At first, you have 20 minutes for the integrated writing. After finished, it's followed by 10 minutes of academic discussion writing time. You will see details of two writing types and score rules here.
2 Integrated Writing
Integrated Writing tests your reading and listening skills together. You have 3 minutes to read academic content (300 words around) as a start, then hear listening material on the same topic and similar size. You need to summarize the contents of the listening material and explain the relationship with the reading material.
It tests your ability to read academic material and combine it with listening material.
To finish your writing in 20 minutes, you must apply a familiar method and skill to organize an essay. Your article should be in one of the following ways:
- Summarize the main points of the lecture and explain how these points are how to challenge or support the specific points in the reading material.
- Summarize the lecture's main points and explain how they are questioned or support specific arguments in the reading material.
- Summarize the lecture's main points and explain how to answer the questions raised in the reading material.
Recommendations for reading:
1. Take notes.
2. Looking for essay points, arguments, or critical examples.
3. Carefully consider how the points to be developed and enhanced.
Usually, there are two ways: arguments and explanations to support the main points, for example, why some policies or measures are considered beneficial or present why some policies and rules are unfavorable and provide arguments and explanations.
4. Don't need to memory or copy reading material.
5. Commonly there are three main points to support or oppose its conclusion.
Recommendations for Listening
1. take notes
You should note details of information, examples, and explanations. For instance, they will illustrate the main points of the reading material, either wrong, not convincing, or even untrue.
Recommendations for Writing
1. After listening, you can remove the headphones.
2. Before writing, you can browse reading material, compare it with notes, and outline your structure.
3. You don't need to put forward your view; only explain the relationship or compare views between reading and hearing materials.
4. Use complete English sentences to write, occasional minor errors in expression, as long as don't affect the meaning of the article, shouldn't affect the final score.
5. Remember to include important information; your paper needs to meet the following points:
- Views, explanations, and arguments in the listening material;
- Clear, correct expression to accurately reflect the relationship between listening and reading materials;
- Notice the correspondences among the main points of reading and listening materials;
- Recommend your article in 150 to 225 words.
3 Academic Discussion Writing
TOEFL writing's second task is an academic essay. As a test taker, you have 10 minutes to plan, write, and revise a paper, which should state and support an opinion in an online classroom discussion.
An effective response contains at least 100 words. If it is less than 100 words, it's still possibly marked as a high score. However, a short answer usually cannot express your view clearly and powerfully. So, 100-word length is an essential factor for a good score.
In this task, you write a typical small academic opinion in response to a question that asks you to express and support your idea on a specified problem. It would be scored on the quality in three aspects:
- Development of your ideas
- Variety in syntactic structures and vocabulary
- Quality and accuracy of the language
Development of your ideas Don't use a large introduction section or summary paragraph to increase the number of words. Provide enough views, examples, explanations, and reasoning or discussion; your article should reach 100.
Variety in syntactic structures and vocabulary You cannot get a good score if you only use simple or basic words and sentence structures. You should show sentence structures and precise vocabulary as flexibly as you can.
Quality and accuracy of the language A few spelling or grammatical errors don't affect the score, but you will significantly lose your rating if the error number goes large.