Instead of reviewing practice exams with Djamila, I decided to take a new approach and go through each of the varieties of questions on the reading exam. She really struggles with time, so I was hoping to help her find some strategies for saving time. Using the TOEFL prep book, we went through the first three chapters which covered vocabulary questions, factual and negative factual questions, and sentence restatement questions. I think the most valuable strategy we covered was that she should look for key words in the question and then scan the reading to quickly locate the sentence that contained the key word. She is very methodical and accurate, but she spends too long re-reading the text, and after learning that strategy, I already noticed an improvement in her speed. I also advised her to answer the questions that don’t require much time first, and come back to the longer questions later. Negative factual questions require you to disprove three statements and then find the answer by process of elimination, so they require a lot of time but aren’t worth any more points. She was often getting stuck on those type of questions and not being able to finish the test, so the new strategies we covered in this session seemed to excite her and give her more confidence towards the test.
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