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Showing posts from August, 2014

TOEFL and the real life or a verbal feast

Have you ever wondered why international exams in English are the way they are? Well, the answer is simple - they imitate the real-life situations, conditions, tasks, and material you will encounter if you go to study, live, or work abroad. Each assessment criterion and task requirement is based on real life. Some students have their doubts about it, but it’s complete and utter truth.  I mostly teach IELTS (Academic) and TOEFL. They have become such an intrinsic part of my life that whatever I watch or read in English I mentally   match it to this or that exam task or requirement. In this post I’m going to talk about citing in integrated tasks in TOEFL. In these tasks you have to report other people’s ideas, and therefore cite information, or indicate who the ideas belong to or where the information comes from.   Naturally, verbs of reporting are vital for such tasks. Students are perfectly happy with “ say ”. However, I’m not. I usually have to fight to get stu...