Advice and ideas for TOEFL and IELTS candidates

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
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If you are preparing for an English language exam such as the TOEFL or IELTS you will benefit form the following advice.

Try to find newspaper articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, newsletter issues that cover topics that interest you. Read them and work with them. For example, you can paraphrase parts of the articles, you can read the articles aloud and record your voice to memorize the text even better, you can share parts of the article that you particularly like here in the forum, etc.

Try to focus on what really interests you. Don’t focus on IELTS because it’s an outdated, hierarchical system that has no future. Remember that you can only learn if you enjoy what you are doing, if you are really passionate about the activities you are engaged in. Please don’t tell me that you are enthusiastic about IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, GRE, etc :wink:

In September 2020, The Guardian published an essay written entirely by GPT-3, an AI-powered system. The essay was error-free and made sense. This means that the age of AI has long since begun and you won’t be able to beat a robot at writing a TOEFL essay. So the sooner you change your strategy, the better. Here is the article:

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When I was studying French, I found that reading Paris Match was an invaluable resource because the articles were written as people normally speak. I still pick it up from time to time although my French is a bit rusty.

I’m not sure what the equivalent would be for English students today.

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Thanks for your useful share. I actually love it.

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The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up. Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.” Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout.