Academic English Skills with Dr. Byrnes

TOEFL Reading Academic Passage Organization Questions. Many students find rhetorical and organization questions challenging. This is because they do not ask you about what is explicitly mentioned, nor do they ask what you can infer from a single sentence. Instead, they require you to step back, zoom out to a macro-level, and analyze how the author builds their argument. Think of it like looking at a book's storyboard or analyzing the big picture. Organization questions test the structure of a passage. They do not test what the author is saying; instead, they test how the author connects ideas together. Because TOEFL reading passages are academic, they generally follow one of two structural paths: Argumentative Passages: These are written to support a central claim. The author presents an idea, theory, or hypothesis, and then either supports it with evidence or refutes it with counterexamples. Explanatory Passages: These are written to explain a specific phenomenon. The author int...

                     Hello everyone! Welcome back to Dr. Byrnes' TOEFL show!   Do you know what the absolute most common sentence type is in the TOEFL Writing 'Build a Sentence' task? You guessed it: Questions! If you analyze the official ETS mock tests, you will see question structures hidden everywhere. In fact, if we look at the official question patterns, they fall into five distinct, high-scoring launchpads: Sentences starting with a Be-verb ( Is, Are, Was ) Sentences starting with a Do-verb ( Do, Does, Did )   Sentences starting with a Have-verb ( Have, Has, Had ) Sentences starting with a Modal Auxiliary ( Can, Will, Should ) Sentences starting with a WH-word ( Who, What, Why, Where, How ) But here is where most students trap themselves: they treat every question the exact same way. In reality, some are straightforward direct questions , while others are lethal comb...