English Teaching and Learning: TOEFL Writing: the Independent Writing Task

Overview of the Independent Writing Task

Source: https://www.coursera.org/learn/toefl-speaking-writing-sections-skills-mastery/supplement/5FKY8/overview-of-the-independent-writing-task

The last task you need to complete on an iBT test is writing an essay. Just like the Integrated Writing task, there is one independent writing task. However, you will not need to read or listen before you type your response. You will have 30 minutes to write your essay on the topic you receive. Although ETS does not state a minimum requirement for the length of the essay, your essay should be about 300 words.

The questions you need to answer ask you to respond to an issue with your opinion. This is how the question usually appears followed by a wide variety of statements as in the following example:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?

Technology has improved the quality of life in the world.

Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

There is no correct or incorrect answer to this question. You are encouraged to use your opinion and personal ideas. Therefore, you should not try to answer this question with memorized phrases.

Scoring

iBT raters will assign a score to your writing based on three areas:

Topic development: your score will depend on the number and types of examples, details, and reasons you use to support your idea. Get a top score by making your essay “well-developed” and supporting your ideas well.
Organization: this means your essay should be easy to follow from the beginning to the end. All the points you include must be related to the essay topic and to the main idea you are making in your response. Get a top score by not repeating ideas (therefore avoiding redundancy), not making unclear connections, and not including unrelated points to your main idea (also called irrelevant ideas).
Language use: this criterion is related to vocabulary and grammatical structure. Use several different sentence structures and choose appropriate words. You will not get a top score if 1) your writing is difficult to follow, 2) you write in too-simple sentences, or 3) your vocabulary is limited.

The following link will show you the rubrics that ETS use to evaluate the Independent (and Integrated) writing tasks. TOEFL iBT® Test — Independent Writing Rubrics

The Prompt

The prompt gives you the topic which you must write about. All the prompts are very general and do not require any special knowledge or experience. As mentioned, you will need to make a choice and choose an idea to support. There is no correct or incorrect answer to the question. The most common topic areas for prompts are education, culture, business, travel, career, friendship, communication, technology, and so on.

In the 5th edition of the TOEFL Official Guide, ETS provides a list of TOEFL independent essay questions. Look over the sample questions. You will also see thorough information in the text, however, below is a useful summary of central subjects divided into types.

Expect a TOEFL independent writing question in one of these four styles:

Agree/Disagree -- most common style; used about 50% of the time
Multiple Choice -- used about 20% of the time
Paired Choice -- used about 20% of the time
“Good Idea” -- used about 10% of the time

Below are samples of each question type.

Sample TOEFL Independent Essay Questions

1. Agree/Disagree Style Prompt:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Overall, the wide use of the internet has a mostly positive effect on life in today’s world.

2. Multiple Choice Style Prompt:

Neighbors are the individuals who live near us. In your opinion, what kind of neighbor is the best?

A quiet neighbor
A neighbor who is similar to us
A supportive neighbor

Use specific details and examples in your answer.

3. Paired Choice Style Prompt

Some people like living in a big city while others prefer a small town. Which place would you choose? Use specific reasons and details to support your answer.

4. “Good Idea” Essay Prompt

The administrators of a university have decided to change which campus areas are prioritized as they revise their budget. They will now budget more money on sports and athletic facilities than on campus libraries. Do you think this is a good idea? Why or why not? Use specific reasons and examples to explain your position.

In this module we will look at some approaches that can help you start and plan your essay when you answer any independent writing task. We will also go over some useful templates that will save you time. However, remember that these templates are merely suggestions that can help you save time and are by no means the only accepted way to write your essay.

Before you proceed, please follow the link below to read more about this task. There is a seven-minute video which summarizes these points as well. The information is available on ETS.org and explains what the task looks like and what you are expected to do. Independent transcript

Finally, after watching the videos, come back to this reading and click on the following link. It will take you to a website that has more than 100 topics to choose from. Next, pick the topic of your choice, time your writing for 30 minutes, and write an essay on that topic. 104 TOEFL Independent Writing Topics. When you finish writing your essay, check it against the rubric to make sure that your essay answers the question properly. If you need a high-score sample answer to help you get ideas, check the following link:

2 Perfect-Scoring TOEFL Writing Samples, Analyzed • PrepScholar TOEFL

Sources:

www.ets.org

The Official Guide to the iBT Test (fifth edition) 2017.

TOEFL Writing (2021) – Sample TOEFL Essays and Questions | Test Resources

There are some useful features that you should use, you will have to cut button, paste button, undo button and another useful feature here is the word count, and you can see how many words you have typed.

For this question, the readers are looking for three main things.

One, development, that means the readers are looking for how well you develop the topic with your details, examples, and reasons. If you just use a lot of words and sentences that don't really support the points you are making about the topic. Or if you just develop ideas not related to the topic, you'll receive a low score.
Second, organization, this basically means a reader can read your essay from beginning to end without becoming confused, you can help the reader follow your ideas by writing in paragraphs and using good transitions.
The third criterion is language use, readers are looking for things like sentence structure, word choice, and vocabulary. It's also important that you use grammar that's strong and consistent. We will talk about all these three in course number 3 when we talk about tips and strategies in writing.

In this section, you need to think about quantity over quality. The more ideas you write, the better, you don't need to worry about them being right or wrong, you'll have a chance to go through them and pick the ones that you want to use in your answer.

the first step in planning has to choose your basic thesis. Thesis is the controlling or central idea of an essay. This simply means choosing what you want to support or agree with. Remember that when you choose a thesis, there's no right or wrong answer. Next, you need to choose your reasons. These reasons need to be strong enough to support your thesis. Next, you need to write a simple outline, you don't have to write a formal outline, just a basic plan for your four or five paragraphs. You may be tempted to skip this step to save time, but an outline will actually save you time as it will help you focus and keep your essay organized.