If you’ve been paying attention to the news about English Language Testing or have been following me on LinkedIn, you already know that the new TOEFL has undergone some major changes. In this blog post I’m going to discuss changes to the reading and listening section and how adaptive testing changes the experience for test takers.
What were the reading and listening sections like on the old TOEFL?
The retired TOEFL had long reading passages about academic topics. They were typically about 700 words long, and each passage had 10 questions. The last question involved providing a summary of the entire passage, requiring test takers to understand the reading in it entirety. There were 2 passages with 20 questions in total.
As for the listening, there were both academic lectures/classroom discussions that were about 5 to 6 minutes long as well as informal conversations between two students or a student and a professor of about 2 to 3 minutes. This tested people’s ability to understand both academic English at an introductory level and informal English for practical situations that occur on a college campus. There were 3 academic passages and 2 campus situation audios with a total of 28 questions.
What question types are there on the new reading and listening sections?
If we start with what’s closest to the same, the reading section still has academic passages, albeit much shorter. They’re typically around 200 words each, making them about 3 or possibly 4 short paragraphs in total. Each academic reading passage has 5 questions.
One of the two additions to the reading section is Read in Daily Life questions. In this case, you’re given a short text (15 to 50 words) such as a social media post, email, announcement, sign, or something similar. You then have to answer 2 to 3 questions about it.
The other addition is Complete the Words questions. You’re provided a short academic text of 70 to 100 words, and the second sentence of the text has 10 words that are missing the second half of the word. Based on the first sentence and the sentences after, you need to write the missing letters.
As for the listening, the academic and campus situation passages are much shorter. Listen to an Academic Talk passages are about 2 minutes long and have 3 questions, and Listen to a Conversation passages are about a minute each with 2 questions.
One of the new question types is Listen to an Announcement. It’s similar to the campus situation passages, but in this case it’s a monologue of less than a minute with 2 questions.
The other question type is Listen and Choose a Response. You basically hear someone say something or ask a question, and you need to choose the correct response. If you have experience with TOEIC, it’s the same type of question that you find there.
What’s adaptive testing?
Adaptive testing is what it sounds like. The difficulty of the reading and listening sections adapt based on how well you do.
Both the reading and listening sections are broken up into two modules. Based on how many correct answers you get in the first module, in the second module you will either receive questions that are more difficult or easier. The more difficult second module will have more academic passages, while the easier one will have more questions about general English.
This is meant to better gauge your language abilities; after all, if you have an upper intermediate level of English, questions about the main idea of an email probably isn’t an effective way of measuring your level. It makes more sense to provide more challenging questions.
What does this mean for test takers?
With shorter reading passages, the reading section feels like it goes by much more quickly. When it comes to Complete the Word questions, there’s isn’t much guessing that you can do; you pretty much either know how to complete the word or you don’t.
As for listening, it also feels like it goes by more quickly. You don’t have the chance to go back to change your answers, so you need to be able to respond right away. I still found it helpful to take notes of key ideas when listening to conversations and the academic talks.
In terms of adaptive testing, it’s crucial for people to get the more difficult second module for reading and listening if they want to get a high score. I asked ETS what the highest score someone could get if they got the easier module, but they weren’t able to tell me.
In any case, it’s important to practice with the new format to feel comfortable and prepared before taking an official test.
If you found this beneficial, feel free to share with others that are preparing TOEFL.
