Purpose of TOEFL Blog

Hello TOEFL Test-takers,

Welcome to my TOEFL blog. My goal is to help you score better on the TOEFL. I am a native English speaker with a BA in English and American Literature, a minor in Linguistics, and a Ph.D. in Psychology with an emphasis on spoken language processing. I have experience developing spoken language tests and tutoring non-native English speakers. I hope you find this information useful.

A few days ago, I came across a nice article by ETS. I always wondered if the speaking items of the TOEFL took into consideration speech patterns that actually occur in university settings. According to this article, there was a speech corpus collected at universities for just this purpose. The article actually lists all the words from the corpus - what a fantastic vocabulary list for folks preparing to take the test! The article is called, "Representing language use in the university: Analysis of the TOEFL 2000 spoken and written academic language corpus."

I think for every few blog posts, I'll mention a word from the list to help with vocabulary development. The most frequent words should be easy for anyone taking the TOEFL (words like "about," "all," "everyone"). So, I'll start with the less frequent words that occur mostly in speech. The first word is "aggression." "The boy was minding his own business when the girl suddenly starting scratching and hitting him. I was surprised by the girl's aggression (an unprovoked attack).