On Sep. 22^nd, two teachers named Pan Fang and Chai Yanfei from TOEFL teaching group of the High School Attached to NWNU went to Xi’an to take part in ETS TOEFL iBT (Internet Based Test) symposium for teachers. With more than 30 representatives from high schools with International department in northwest and southwest regions of China being invited, the symposium aims to help TOEFL iBT teachers fully understand the teaching concept of iBT English language, learn about the scoring criteria of iBT speaking and writing and acquire the iBT learning objectives and the corresponding teaching methods and class activity designing by the face-to-face interaction between ETS official lecturers and the participants.        Zhu Chong, the guest speaker of the symposium as well as the ETS TOEFL consultant, conducted the training from six aspects. At first, he introduced the iBT comprehensively. He emphasized that as a kind of academic language assessment test, the language competence requirements of TOEFL are based on the real college life context, simulating campus language environment and the use habits of academic language. The main part of the training covered the teaching objectives of reading, listening, speaking and writing as well as the corresponding skill requirements. Based on this, he showed how to design activities in the classroom teaching process by discussing actively with all the participants and sharing his own exploration and practice experience. In the teaching design part, Mr. Zhu put forward the student-oriented teaching idea and K-W-L mode based on TOEFL curriculum design, i.e. what I have known- what I want to know- what I have learnt, which changes the passive inculcation into active inquiry, contributing to arousing the enthusiasm of students for learning independently and guaranteeing better learning effects. When teachers teach listening and reading in the classroom, some time should be spared for students to learn about the background information by themselves so as to better understand a certain category of passages. In this way can help to raise the students’ scores.        According to the new TOEFL rules issued in Aug. 1^st 2019, the speaking part has been changed a lot. Based on this, Mr. Zhu explained this part in depth and shared his own teaching experience about speaking. Now the TOEFL speaking includes four parts with 1 independent task and 3 integrated tasks and the time limit is 17 minutes. (The speaking part in the past contained 6 parts, respectively 2 independent tasks and 4 integrated tasks with the time limit of 20 minutes.) Moreover, he also explained in detail the scoring criteria of the independent task and integrated tasks in speaking. During the training, every teacher is required to predict the students’ scores based on the sound samples in accordance with the new scoring criteria, which can help to improve the teachers’ capabilities of assessing students’ speaking ability in their teaching activities. At the same time, the training of writing mainly focused on training teachers to have a relatively exact assessment on students’ writing. And on the other hand, the teachers can find the problems that students should pay attention to in their writings.
      The iBT training is beneficial to teachers’ further understanding of TOEFL new rules. By following Mr. Zhu’s lecture, the teachers studied carefully the scoring criteria of TOEFL speaking and writing, which can help the teachers to be more professional in their assessment for the school’s TOEFL model tests by applying the detailed scoring criteria.