ETS, the company behind the
TOEFL iBT Test (also the GRE and formerly the GMAT), has always published regularly its
Official Guide. Because of this, the guide is highly reliable, making it one of the most essential and best TOEFL books on the market.This guide is your first must-stop whether you wanna to prepare at your best for the TOEFL exam. Not only that, it contains “real” questions, giving students an accurate sense of the level of difficulty and what is actually the test. It is fairly close to the test you are going to sustain.
The book guides you in a pretty extensive manner throughout the test, which means after introducing the format of the exam itself: the four sections that test you on what are the essential skills to communicating in an English environment, then the book goes explaining each of these aforementioned 4 sections. Each of these chapters explains the format of that section, the areas you’ll be tested on, and the question types you’ll see. Strategies for preparing for that section and several practice sets are also included at the end of each chapter.
Most importantly: the book contains three complete test via computer format for simulating the real experience of the test day, along with answer explanations. This is really positive. However, the negative side is that the explanations say
why the answers are right but not why the other choices are
wrong. This is a huge downside because to achieve the best score you can, the student must have also the reason why a question is wrong, for increasing and taking an in-depth sense of the questions, what is tested, indeed a better understanding ofthe test as whole. Probably the best explanation part is the examples of high - and low - level speaking responses.
Another important aspect is the strategy provided. The sense you have going across the book is that almost there is no strategy to overcome the test. This is a bit misleading. One one hand, there is a strategy for improving your score in every section of the test. On the other hand, other non-official books, even though they are really good for helping in your preparation, rely too heavy on strategy; this is wrong because the most important way to rise your score is simply to get more English experience. You have to practice your English outside of doing bookwork and test practice to get a higher TOEFL score. The book does a good job of addressing this fact.