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 students to use something other than “The professor says”. There are so many verbs that can be used instead! Look: 

 

(Source: The Complete Guide to the TOEFL test, Bruce Rogers). 

 

Impressive? And the list is not exhaustive! Now look at a model answer for a Writing Task 1: 

 

(Source: Express to the TOEFL iBT TEST, Tammy LeRoi Gilbert and Dorothy E. Zemach).   

Now, how does it work in real life? 

In winter I got hooked on taking online courses, particularly at edx.org. One of the courses I took there was “Justice” taught by Michael Sandel, a Professor at Harvard University. This course is an introduction to moral and political philosophy and the philosophers covered included Aristotle, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls. Since the professor spoke about the views of these philosophers at every lecture, reporting verbs were an indispensable part of the whole course!

See for yourselves: 
 
Example 1. John Locke.

Today, we turn to John Locke.

On the face of it, Locke is a powerful ally of the libertarian. First, he believes, as libertarians today maintain, that there are certain fundamental individual rights that are so important that no government, even a representative government, even a democratically elected government, can override them. Not only that, he believes that those fundamental rights include a natural right to life, liberty, and property. And, furthermore, he argues that the right to property is not just the creation of government or of law. The right to property is a natural right in the sense that it is prepolitical. It is a right that attaches to individuals as human beings, even before government comes on the scene, even before parliaments and legislatures enact laws to define rights and to enforce them. Locke says in order to think about what it means to have a natural right, we have to imagine the way things are before government, before law, and that's what Locke means by the state of nature. He says the state of nature is a state of liberty. Human beings are free and equal beings. There is no natural hierarchy. It's not the case that some people are born to be kings and others are born to be serfs. We are free and equal in the state of nature and yet, he makes the point that there is a difference between a state of liberty and a state of license. And the reason is that even in the state of nature, there is a kind of law. It's not the kind of law that legislatures enact. It's a law of nature.

Example 2. Aristotle.

We turn to Aristotle after examining theories, modern theories, of justice that try to detach considerations of justice and rights from questions of moral desert and virtue.

Aristotle disagrees with Kant and Rawls. Aristotle argues that justice is a matter of giving people what they deserve. And the central idea of Aristotle's theory of justice is that in reasoning about justice and rights we have, unavoidably, to reason about the purpose, or the end, or the telos, of social practices in institutions.

Yes, justice requires giving equal things to equal persons, but the question immediately arises, in any debate about justice, equal in what respect? And Aristotle says we need to fill in the answer to that question by looking to the characteristic end, or the essential nature, or the purpose, of the thing we're distributing. And so we discussed Aristotle's example of flutes, who should get the best flutes. And Aristotle's answer was the best flute-players. The best flute-player should get the best flute because that's the way of honoring the excellence of flute playing. It's a way of rewarding the virtue of the great flute-player.

What's interesting though, and this is what we are going to explore today, is that it's not quite so easy to dispense with teleological reasoning when we're thinking about social institutions and political practices. In general it's hard to do without teleology when we're thinking about ethics, justice, and moral argument. At least that is Aristotle's claim.

In this example you can also see one more way of reporting – using a noun phrase: Aristotle’s claim, Aristotle’s answer, the central idea of … is.

For dessert – Example 3.  Aristotle’s defense of slavery.

Not only is it TOEFL-like, but also quite curious. I’m not going to upload the script for this extract. Watch it, find out why Aristotle believed that slavery was necessary and don’t forget to keep an ear open for reporting verbs. Enjoy! 

 

Oh, and hats off to the brilliant teacher for an absolutely fascinating course! Highly recommended!