TOEFL Prep: What Actually Moves Your Score

Most of the TOEFL students who come to me have already taken the test, or a full practice test, and didn't get the score they expected.

The story is almost always the same. The student believed they were fluent. The test said otherwise. And by the time they reach me, they've often spent real money on conversation classes or logged hundreds of hours on language apps, only to watch their score stall in the same range attempt after attempt.

Here's what I've learned about why that happens, and what actually moves a TOEFL score.

Why “fluent” speakers fail the TOEFL

One student came to me convinced her English was strong. She'd paid for plenty of conversation classes. She could hold a conversation comfortably. But her score wasn’t going up, and she couldn't understand why.

The answer was underneath the conversation: her grammar foundation was shaky. Conversation classes had made her comfortable, but comfort isn't the same as control. When the TOEFL asked her to write a structured response or speak on an academic topic under time pressure, the gaps showed. Add test anxiety on top of a shaky foundation, and the score told a story her conversations never did.

That's the pattern I see over and over: confidence and anxiety tangled together, sitting on top of a foundation that was never fully built.

The uncomfortable truth about apps and conversation classes

Duolingo, language apps, conversation groups, YouTube lessons: these are all fine tools. I'm not against any of them. I post videos on YouTube and TikTok as well. 

But they will not pass the TOEFL for you.

Real learning, not just test prep, is always the best way to build real English skills. And at the same time, the TOEFL is a test, with its own structure, its own question styles, and its own clock. Passing it takes both things at once: genuine English knowledge, and a working knowledge of how the test itself behaves. 

Students who have one without the other often don’t improve at the rate necessary. If you're on a time crunch, the priority becomes having enough English control to navigate the test effectively, and that's a different skill than casual fluency.

What trips students up, section by section

Reading takes longer than students expect. They get tripped up on unfamiliar words and don't read fast enough, and sometimes there simply isn't time to read as closely as they'd like. Reading speed and vocabulary under pressure are trainable, but not in a week. (Want to see where you stand? Try my free TOEFL reading practice exercise.)

Listening surprises people for a different reason: the question styles. Students are often simply not used to the way the TOEFL asks questions, so they lose points on material they actually understood.

Speaking and writing are where a game plan pays off most. These sections feel the scariest, but they become much more manageable when you walk in with a structure for your response. I teach my students TEDL, the paragraph framework I developed to help students in these exact scenarios. Having a plan for the shape of your answer frees your attention for the content, and it takes a real bite out of test anxiety. You're never staring at a blank screen wondering how to begin, because you always know what kind of sentence comes next. (Here is a free TOEFL writing exercise.)

Where to go from here

If your score has stalled and you suspect the problem runs deeper than practice tests can fix, that's exactly the situation my TOEFL coaching is built for: a diagnostic first, then a plan aimed at your specific gaps.

Learn how my one-on-one TOEFL coaching works.