2018-10-26 TOEFL: independent writing

Greg Malivuk
[email protected]
http://www.pastebin.com/u/gmalivuk - notes from all classes
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Independent writing practice.
When you’re finished, email your responses to me (you can just copy and paste the text into the email).
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BREAK
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With your partners, look at the four sample responses to the second task. What’s good and bad about each one? What score should it receive?
A - 2 - This response understands and mostly answers the question. The student gives some reasons why old friends are more important. However, it’s not really clear that this is actually the writer’s thesis. There are many grammar and vocabulary problems. Also, the main ideas are very underdeveloped.
B - 5 - The conclusion is short and doesn’t really restate the main idea. There are some grammar errors (“a few...friendship”). However, the errors don’t interfere with meaning, and otherwise the connections and support are very clear.
- This is also a good example of how you can organize an “it depends” response.
C - 1 - This does seem to understand the question and attempt to respond to the topic. However, there is no development of the supporting reasons and “this response earns the low score because it contains consistent language errors that make the overall essay difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend.”
D - 3 - There’s a clear answer to the question: “new friends give you the bigger advantage”. However, the reasons that support the answer are not very easy to identify because the organization isn’t very good. Paragraphs or transition signals could have helped with this a lot. In addition, some of the reasons for the answer are not developed as much as they should be.
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Remember, the details and examples in a body paragraph have two “jobs”:
- Show that the reason (the topic of the body paragraph) is true.
- Show that the reason supports your thesis statement.
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Homework (optional): If you want more feedback on today’s writing than a score and a couple sentences, send me a self-evaulation this weekend. Tell me what you think you did well in this writing (or what you improved since your last writing). What did you do badly? (What will you try to improve for next time?) You don’t have to estimate your own score, but you can read the ETS descriptions at https://www.ets.org/s/toefl/pdf/toefl_writing_rubrics.pdf for ideas about what things might be good or bad.