Customer Reviews

Longman Preparation Course for the TOEFL Test: Skills and Strategies

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have been preparing students for TOEFL examinations for over 2 years and this is my number one book. Compared to Barron's , Peterson's or other preparation materials, Deborah Phillips' book gives the student the chance to actually improve their scores by focusing on how to think and approach the test. In the case of "Structure and written expression" section, for instance,the results were amazing. When doing the preliminary test most of my students not only got wrong more than half of the exercices, but they were also unable to finish in time, which meant even more mistaken answers. Time is of crucial importance! After having completed the preparation in this book, first, all of them managed to finish in time and second, the number of errors dropped dramatically (from 20 out of 40 to 10 and even 5). All my students have used this book and all have scored above 550 in the TOEFL examination. It's been a valuable and indispensable instument for me and I highly reccomend it.

As a test-preparation instructor for just over two years, I've used many different test-prep publications in many different learning environments. By far, the Longman Prep. Course for the TOEFL has proven time and again to be effective. Many test-prep publications are written in a manner that interferes with a learner's self-study ambitions. Explanations of exercises, grammar points, and skills are often more difficult for the learner to comprehend than the content of the test itself. Longman's Prep Course manages to circumvent this problem by identifying the fact that students with various levels of ability will be accessing their texts, and has made the instructions and explanations as clear and intelligible as possible. Author Deborah Phillips has identified (correctly, I believe) a limited number of skills which students can focus on first to stabilize, then to increase, their TOEFL scores. This comes as some relief to weary test-prep teachers, faced with a miasma of unrelated grammatical and content questions from students who, thanks to other overly schematic publications, have been shocked into believing that TOEFL study is amorphous, endless, and requires students to know absolutely everything about everything. It's simply not so. Additionally, Phillips has spared no effort in providing plenty of practice questions related to individuals skills; students get to practice the specific skill in isolation, then in conjunction with previously learned skills. The cumulative learning dynamic is much appreciated by students who tend to have previous knowledge displaced if they are not continually prompted to exercise that knowledge. Finally, Phillips has 'coded' the questions in each of the texts diagnostic tests, allowing students to identify which skills they need to improve on, hence allowing students to distribute their time more effectively. Only recently have I used any other text. I'll not name that text here, but I will say that it did me the enormous favor of reminding me of just how superior Phillips' text is. I highly recommend this text to both students and teachers of TOEFL. You'll love it.

This TOEFL prep book does not adequately prepare advanced students for listening, grammar, or reading problems. The content in the listening and grammar sections is off-base. Worse is the reading section which contains readings which are often less than one half the length of actual readings on the test. The book is probably suitaable for low intermediate students, but that's about it.

I used this book as a sole source to study for TOEFL (after browsing at least 4-5 others), did the tests from this book, Barron's TOEFL, Kaplan TOEFL, and the official ones and I got an excellent score in the real exam (my English before taking the test was high-school level). It features only high-yield grammar topics and a very good listening-comprehension section. Extremely useful especially if you don't have much time to prepare for the exam (I had 3 weeks).

I bought this book because my teacher recommended me and i thought that the real toefl test would be easy. I took the test and i couldn't believe how different it was from the book. Now i changed my teacher and i do not recommend the longman prep to anyone. If you really want to be prepared for the test, practice with the ETS and see the difference.

What a waste of money! After finishing the course, I was sure to get the 600 I needed, but to my astonishment, the actual test was a lot more difficult than the course!