Online TOEFL Course
Ricardo needs to improve his writing score, so he joined an Online TOEFL Course to help him do just that.
A native Spanish speaker from Chile, Ricardo knew the grammar of English and Spanish were different, but he had no idea how much trouble these differences would affect his writing score on the TOEFL exam. After looking at his TOEFL score report, Riccardo noticed that his vocabulary and grammar limitations were affecting his ability to fully express his ideas. But what exactly were his grammar limitations and how were they affecting his ability to express ideas in English. Ricardo was going to solve the mystery by finding out exactly what problems he was having.
Therefore, as a subscriber to The Online TOEFL Course called “The 7-Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT,” Ricardo paid for the additional service of having his TOEFL iBT writing mentor correct all the errors in his essay. Thus, after Ricardo completed Independent Writing Practice Test 15, he had his TOEFL writing mentor make a screen capture video correcting all of the errors in this essay. His TOEFL writing mentor prepared a 62 minute video going over his 323 word essay. After Ricardo watched the video, he now knew what his main grammar problems were: sentence structure, punctuation, and verb tenses.
Regarding sentence structure, Ricardo was having three main problems: comma splices, run-on sentences, and fragments. He would make the comma splice error when he joined two separate sentences together with a comma. The run-on sentence manifested itself when Ricardo joined two separate sentences together with no punctuation. Lastly, Ricardo sometimes created sentence fragments; that is to say, sentences with no subjects and no main verbs in the independent clauses parts of the sentences. In other words, Ricardo did not know when one sentence ended and a new one began. Unfortunately, since being able to create a sentence with a subject and a verb is the basic staple for writing a paragraph and ultimately an entire essay, Ricardo needed to solve this problem if he wanted to score higher on the writing portion of the TOEFL exam.
Ricardo’s biggest challenge with punctuation was commas, this area also overlapping into his sentence structure problems. Ricardo’s TOEFL writing mentor told him that he was using commas too much, and that he would need to become more familiar with not just knowing when to use or not use commas, but he would need to become more familiar with semi-colons, colons, hyphens, dashes, and apostrophes.
Verb tenses were also part of Ricardo’s grammar errors, particularly differentiating among the simple past, the present prefect, and the simple present tenses. In Spanish, there are 28 verb tenses, whereas in English there are only 13. Therefore, these differences between the two languages and their verb tenses were causing confusion.
In conclusion, Ricardo intently watched the video as his TOEFL writing mentor made 62 minutes of corrections to his essay. During the video, his TOEFL Writing Mentor corrected the errors and told him what lessons in his “7-Step Course” to focus on. In a nutshell, his TOEFL writing mentor had shown Ricardo what errors he was making, how he could correct them, and what grammar lessons he could focus on that would help him minimize those errors when he took the TOEFL exam again.
Online TOEFL Course