If you need an “advanced” score of 24 on TOEFL iBT Writing, I want to share the details about how to join me in Zoom for my upcoming classes where you’ll get feedback on TOEFL Integrated and Independent essays for 6 weeks — so you’re moving forward with your career goals.
Below, you’ll see lots of details about common questions:
- What’s the agenda for Writing classes?
- How does Group Feedback work?
- What topics can I write about?
- When are classes?
- When do we start?
- I don’t want to wait. How do I start earlier?
- I can’t attend classes. Are there recordings?
- What about my typing speed?
- How much does it cost?
- What’s the deadline to register?
- How do I join?
- Can I join the Wednesday Speaking classes, too?
- I have more questions. How do I contact you?
I love the group classes I teach. The energy is always really great. These classes are an excellent chance to ask questions that you’ve been wondering — and then also get my feedback and see essays written by other ambitious students. Collectively, a group of students can write more essays than just you by yourself.
Many students who join my classes feel more energized and focused about studying for TOEFL iBT than they do by themselves.
Our Focus is *Always* How to Get W24
Because the majority of students in my classes are pharmacists, physical therapists, nurses or other healthcare professionals who need the same kind of scores, whenever I give you feedback, I’m always assuming that you need an “advanced” Writing score of 24.
The video below is one that I recorded when I still had my school, English Success Academy… but it’s useful for you to watch it because it compares my feedback style to an anonymous tutor’s…
1. "What's the agenda?"
You will need 10-15 hours per week to prepare for these classes.
Every week, you’ll get specific preparation assignments from me. If you’ve been studying with the Understand How to Get W24+ video series, then you may be partially finished with some of those assignments…
This is your preparation schedule:
- Monday October 18 – An Orientation to Advanced Writing Scores
- Monday October 25 – Writing Advanced Integrated Essays, Part 1
- Monday November 1 – Writing Advanced Independent Essays, Part 1
- Monday November 8 – Writing Advanced Integrated Essays, Part 2
- Monday November 15 – Writing Advanced Independent Essays, Part 2
- Monday November 22 – Developing Automaticity, or How to Write Advanced Essays “Automatically”
After you finish watching the preparation material, you’ll write essays. That is the main goal: writing essays… a lot of them.
You’ll choose from the ones that you write which ones you want to bring to the Monday classes.
2. "How does Group Feedback work?"
At the beginning of each class, I ask, “Who wants feedback today?” and the people who do type “yes” or “me” in chat. That creates the queue.
Every Monday, you can bring an essay for a TPO to our class and get feedback from me. You put it in Google Drive into a folder that you and I share so that I can open it on my computer — and then everyone can look at it. That means you can also observe other students’ essays and hear the feedback that I give this.
Because everyone is free to choose their own essay topic, we have a great mix of topics each class. It’s rare that anyone writes the same essay… So during the 90 minutes, we’ll look at up to 10 essays and we cover a lot of topics.
Over the 6 weeks, the breakdown of the feedback is like this:
- Class 1. free topic — You choose either Integrated or Independent, so we’ll have a random mix.
- Class 2. Integrated Essays only
- Class 3. Independent Essays only
- Class 4. Integrated Essays only
- Class 5. Independent Essays only
- Class 6. free topic — You choose which type to share, so again there’s a random mix.
3. "What topics can I write about?"
You can pick whichever prompts you want for Integrated or Independent essays. This allows you to choose easier or more difficult topics, depending on your current skill level at the moment.
In terms of which source of practice to use, you can use any TPO website or database of realistic practice material.
4. "When are classes?"
Mondays from 3 PM to 4:30 PM California / Pacific Standard Time — so you may need to adjust to your time zone, depending on where you are.
5. "When do we start?"
The first class is Monday October 18… but you’ll need to prepare by watching video lectures, so you will be busy from at least October 12, but I do recommend starting now to decrease stress!
6. "I don't want to wait. How do I start sooner?"
After you pay and register, you will get the preparation schedule for classes. You can begin preparing now and ticking things off the To Do list.
By starting now, you’ll finish the preparation activities — which means that you’ll have more time to create essays…. which means that by the time classes start, you’ll already have improved.
By registering now, you will see bigger improvements.
7. "I can't attend class. Are there recordings?"
YES, there will be recordings.
I started using a new hosting website to host these video recordings. The website miraculously and automatically transcribes what I say… It’s amazingly accurate without me editing it! And it puts subtitles on the video recordings — like in the picture below. So you can literally see all the words that I’m saying.
The best part of that is that you can search the video transcripts for keywords… and then you can jump to that part of the video. For sure, reviewing is way more efficient with this.
HOWEVER, there are 2 very important caveats:
1) In order to get feedback, you need to be there to actually talk to me and ask any questions that you have while I’m reading your essay and giving feedback. I’m promising to be available to you during that 90 minutes, so if you send me your TOEFL response outside of class and say, “Jaime I was too busy so can you please just take a look at my response and give me feedback? Here’s my response…” I make absolutely no guarantees about how soon I can give you that feedback — or even if I can. You might not get feedback. To get the best experience, you need to be there live. If this format doesn’t work for you, then you can click here to see the options to purchase my private feedback or private lessons.
2) You will have a limited amount of time to watch these class video recordings. For a wide variety of reasons, the video recordings are not permanent or downloadable so you must stay organized and motivated to get the information that you need from them soon after classes finish.
8. "I think my slow typing speed is part of my problem. What can we do about that?"
When you need a score of 24+ on TOEFL iBT Writing, your fingers must be able to type at least 35 words per minute. Faster is better. Just for reference, I can type 85 to 90 words per minute and that only helps me.
To keep a healthy focus on typing, we’ll be having a group competition to see which student improves the most with their typing speed over the 6 weeks.
By registering early, you’ll have extra time to practice! 😄
9. "How much does it cost?"
Option 1: The Group-Only Bundle
This bundle includes the 3 items that you need for these classes:
- item #1: a seat in my 6 weeks of Zoom classes for Writing $150
- item #2: preparation material:
- My newer e-course, Understand How to Get W24+ (normally $125 but you get a discount)
- My older e-course, 24+ Writing Tutorial (normally $47 but you get a discount)
The cost for Option 1 is $275. All the feedback is in the group.
Option 2: Everything above plus Private Feedback
In addition to everything in Option 1, this also includes my service, Understand How to Fix Fossilized Errors. By adding this, you also get:
- Follow-up after the end of group classes
- Private feedback on 4 TOEFL essays OR 2 TOEFL essays and 4 TOEFL Speaking files
- 3 Memory Pouches to retrain “fossilized” mistakes with grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation
a seat in my live Zoom class to learn how to use Memory Pouches - A personalized study schedule of what to keep studying in order to keep seeing an improvement
- Click to see more details and student reviews
This personal package, Understand How to Fix Fossilized Errors, adds $450 to the cost — so the total for Option 2 is $275 + $450 = $725.
If you need a special payment plan to break that into smaller monthly payments, let me know!
10. "What's the deadline to register for classes?"
Class is limited to a maximum of 10 students.
Theoretically, the deadline to enroll is Thursday October 14… but if all the seats fill up before that, it’ll be too late.
If you want to reserve your seat or discuss a payment plan, you should tell me today!
11. "How do I join?"
Step 1: Configure your classes for either Option 1 or Option 2. By clicking either of the 2 links below, you visit my website where you configure the class focus and add to cart.
Step 2: Choose “Writing Classes” and then add the bundle to your cart.
Step 3: Finish paying on my website with PayPal, credit card or debit card.
After you pay, you will have an account on my website with immediate access to the e-course preparation material.
12. "Can I enroll in Writing classes too?"
If you can study without distractions for 25-30 hours per week (which is 6-7 hours per day every day for 5 days every week) for the next 8 weeks, then yes, you can also enroll in Speaking classes.
Note: You will need other e-courses for the Writing classes, and that changes the prices. So in that case, please contact me so we can discuss it.
13. "I have more questions. How do we talk about those?"
On the Contact page of my website, I explain how to get in touch with me. I don’t list it here because there are robots that crawl webpages and add this information to databases for spam, so please visit my Contact page…