Guangzhou YMCA TOEFL  week 5   2007/01/11                         home page         




Maybe if we worked on some really difficult English language in class, 'acing' this little
TOEFL exam might be a 'slam dunk' (basketball - 'a foregone conclusion') for you. I could
start throwing you 'curve balls' (baseball - 'very tricky questions', etc). I could read the 
following and ask you to speak about the (edited) text's main points:
      
      There's a certain slant of light,
      On winter afternoons,
      That oppresses, like the weight
      Of cathedral tunes.

      Heavenly hurt it gives us; ...

      Shadows hold their breath;
      When it goes, 't is like the distance
      On the look of death.

But since the author of this (Emily Dickinson) probably had the strongest mind of any soul
that lived the last 400 years, and I don't know what she's talking about (but it's not only
'light' as in 'photons' that she writes about), what would be the point of this ? The only point 
is that I like Emily's poetry. It does you no good ( except to inform you that Emily Dickinson,
of 19th century New England, is America's, and perhaps the world's, most famous female poet).


I think that this week we should continue what we did last time - listen and take notes on a spoken 
passage/text, either from the CD's or read by me, and have you answer a question about it. We can 
also talk about ways to approach answering the questions where there is both a written and spoken
passage, which are shown fairly well, I think, on pages 197 - 214 of the study guide, and try 
one or two from the book if we wish. 

Hopefully, I can find some good examples of reading passages similar to the ones used on the exam
(but a little more difficult) and read them to you. Unfortunately, most internet sites from the 
US are either working very slowly or not at all (stupid earthquake!), so this may not be so easy
for me. Maybe I'll try to write something myself that mimics the spoken passages on the exam. It 
will be difficult for me to create my own combination questions with both reading and listening.

I could also be smart and go fishing for articles in newspapers other than the New York Times - where
the writers have a tendency to 'show off' - using convoluted sentence structures, new fangled idioms
found growing wild on Big Apple streets, words lurking only the in the behemothic edition of Webster's, 
the occasional illusion borrowed furtively from some famous literary waste land that virtually no one
will understand, and perhaps a bit of poesy tossed into the salad just to add some extra color to 
the black and white world in which their writings (and sometimes the writers themselves ) dwell.

I will try not to write like that.

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946