钟登杰

　　青岛新航道托福高分学员钟登杰在托福考试中取得托福听力24阅读24口语28写作28总分104的好成绩，一战便取得如此佳绩，实在可喜可贺。

　　钟登杰：

　　On the Wednesday afternoon of September 21, I found out my score. I was shocked at that moment because of the unexpected result. As a high school sophomore, taking the TOEFL test for the first time; given the effort I paid and the degree of difficulty of the test I took, I did not expect a score above 100. However, I did. My family and I were very excited and grateful when they noticed my score.

　　I started taking TOEFL lessons since middle school, and that’s not a common thing in China. My mom’s principle is getting everything done as soon as possible, so she decided to let me get started a little earlier. I’m different from most, and I’m not saying that my English level is a lot better than other students. I received education from many different schools, and mostly international schools. The way international school education students, and the way they teach English is different from the traditional local schools. That is the reason why many lessons that I took in new channel don’t fit me very well, especially grammar classes. Strictly speaking, I have never taken any grammar class, but still I don’t make simple grammar mistakes. I could recognize and correct simple grammar mistakes, yet I couldn’t explain the mistake grammatically. Therefore, I never understood anything that the teacher taught in my grammar classes, and also everything that the other teachers taught me in other classes that were about grammar. This had lead to another problem that I encountered in reading classes.

　　My reading teacher is a little eccentric, energetic which I could tell by how fast she teaches a lesson, and she’s also a little hard to deal with. But I am certainly not saying that she’s a bad teacher. She always thought I’m slow, or I’m not concentrated during class because I couldn’t answer her question immediately. But that is because I really didn’t know the answers, due to the fact that her way of education doesn’t fit me as well. The techniques that she taught me require a certain grammar degree which I didn’t reach. So I couldn’t use any of those techniques in the test. Between my first simulated test and my real test, I didn’t actually do anything in an attempt to improve my reading level, and therefore I was stunned by my reading score. In my simulated test, I got 17 on reading, and in real test, I got 24. To be honest, the only difference between these two tests is that I focused way more on the real test. This shows that focus, or concentration is really important when we are taking a test.

　　Besides writing, another challenging subject for me was writing. I was never a good writer, either writing in English or Chinese. I’ve never learned many complicated sentence structure. More importantly, I don’t have a lot of ideas, which is essential to writing. Presumably because I lacked knowledge in writing the most, I have learned the most in writing classes among all the classes I took. The teacher taught how to start and end a paragraph and an essay, and that’s significant. I’ve learned new sentence structure that I’ve never seen before, and I used some of it in my real test. However, I had the least confidence in writing. I was afraid I couldn’t spell the words correctly or make sure every sentence is grammatically correct. And most of all, I was afraid I couldn’t come up with any good points and ideas. In fact, I didn’t come up with any good points, but I did got a score of 28 in writing. I believe the reason is that I tried hard. I came up with two points for my independent essay, and those points weren’t good in my opinion. But the time is limited. I didn’t have time to think of any other ideas. So what I did is, try my best to expand on the points I’ve made. I used words and sentences to embellish my points, make it look as good as possible with words. In the In the end, I wrote a 450 words essay, and I got 28 on my overall writing.

　　The other two subjects, speaking and listening haven’t been a great concern to me. I’ve studied in international schools for years, and I’ve been listening and talking in English for years. So these two subjects were not a big problem, especially listening. I have the most confidence in listening because I did well on my first listening class. I had an average of 80 percent chance of answering the question correctly without taking any notes, which means out of 6 questions, I could correctly answer 5 of them. However, the score I got on listening shocked me. It was a shame that I only scored 24 on my real test. It’s ironic that I scored this low on the subject that I was most confident in, and I scored 28 on the subject that I had the least confidence. However, I scored pretty well on speaking. Speaking shouldn’t be a problem, but since it requires ideas as well, it was a big concern to me. Nevertheless, it turned out well. I scored 28 on speaking. I believe my English fluency made up for the lack of ideas.

　　All in all, my first TOEFL test wasn’t disappointing. My family and I are satisfied with this score. However, when my mom broke the news to me, my heart dropped. She told me that the score will not be available by the time I apply for university. The score will expire in two years. If I took the test one month later, it would be available, but it’s too late. I do not have the confidence to score the same or higher than the first test and this whole process is exhausting. I can’t believe I have to go through this again. But there’s nothing that can be done. All I can do is try my best, and hope I do as good, or even better than the first time.

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