How Do You Fit Studying a Foreign Language Into Your Normal Life?

These are some tricks Shree came up with when preparing for the TOEFL:

1. Chatting with friends

For the speaking section, I used to simply chat with my friend in English, asking random questions and taking turns answering. We would listen closely to each other and then give each other possible improvements. We made it like a game; the first one to fail to answer would be the loser.

2. Listening to the radio

Listening to BBC Newsalso helped me sharpen my listening skills. Often I didn’t just listen; I used to take notes as well, since note-taking is a crucial skill for the TOEFL.

3. Thinking about my day

To practice the writing section, at the end of each day I forced myself to write an essay summarizing all that day’s events. Sometimes I would write about the person I hated the most, just for fun.

4. Going to sleep

I also listened to the radio as I was going to bed as further practice for my listening skills, and used to listen to something that would bore me literally to sleep.

“What I realized while preparing for the TOEFL is that it’s not just a test you have to get through.  It’s actually a measure of whether you will be able to survive in a college where English is the priority language.  Each of the four sections corresponds to something you’ll actually have to do; like reading through a textbook for an assignment, listening to a teacher to take notes for a project, speaking with your friends, or writing homework in a rush.”

What are your challenges in learning English?

Jawad lists these as his barriers to improving his TOEFL score.  He has been applying to universities in the U.S., but so far says he doesn’t have a good enough TOEFL score to apply to many universities or get the financial aid he needs.  Read more of Jawad’s story at http://blogs.voanews.com/student-union/2012/08/07/toefl-might-just-be-the-last-of-many-hurdles-jawads-story

I struggle a lot with the following things in English:

GRAMMAR

Paragraph/sentence structure: Sometimes I get confused about how to connect sentences together and which kind of connection I should use. In English there are different kinds of adjectives, adverbs, verbs, nouns, etc., and usually I doubt whether I am using them correctly in the sentence.

I am often unsure whether the adverb I used at the beginning of paragraph is correct or not (furthermore, moreover, likewise, however, hence, therefore, etc.).

Whenever I read back a piece of my writing that I wrote, I realize that my writing is poor and very basic. I review and recheck it again and again but I don’t see any change in it compared to other writings from people at the same level.

Punctuation marks: One of my biggest challenges in writing English is where I can use punctuation marks. “Is the comma I used here correct? How many commas can I use in a sentence? I think the sentence is too long; can I end the sentence here?” are questions I often ask myself.

There are lots of punctuation marks that I don’t even know how to use:

Full stop/period, comma, semi-colon, hyphen, dash, apostrophe, exclamation mark, slash, backslash, quotation marks, underline, underscore, round brackets, square brackets, ellipsis, etc.

READING

I understand my English vocabulary is not good enough. Usually when I read English news articles, story books, or science readings, I have to have a dictionary too. Sometimes in a single page I have to look up twenty to thirty words in the dictionary, and I get bored when I finish that page. Sometimes I fall asleep during the reading. I have this problem in writing as well.

LISTENING COMPREHENSION

When I first took TOEFL test I realized that my English listening comprehension is very poor, especially in long conversations or lecture talks.