TOEFL Reading Self-study Course

Struggling with TOEFL Reading?
Whether you're aiming for a solid 25 or the perfect 30, this course will give you the skills and strategies to get there.

Scoring high on TOEFL Reading isn’t just about knowing vocabulary and grammar—it requires a combination of skills that allow you to process information quickly, understand text structure, and avoid the test makers' traps. This course teaches you everything you need to ace the TOEFL Reading section.

Master All the Necessary Techniques to Ace TOEFL Reading

TOEFL Reading is hard because there is time pressure—you have to read and answer in just 17 minutes per passage. But even if you had an hour per passage, you might still end up choosing the wrong answers if you don’t know what TOEFL Reading is actually testing. So, what are the challenges, and what do we teach to help you overcome them?

🔹 First, we teach you how to read smart. TOEFL passages are notoriously long and full of academic jargon. Even highly educated native speakers struggle to fully understand some passages without background knowledge. But here’s the key: you don’t need to understand everything to find the right answers. The secret is reading smart, not hard. This course teaches you how to see the forest, not just the trees—by reading in segments of ideas rather than word by word or sentence by sentence. For example, when reading a passage on theories of X, you’ll learn to segment the text by theories, supporting evidence, and counterarguments. This ability to see the organization is critical to answering rhetorical purpose questions.

🔹 Next, we teach you how to identify and decode clue sentences to answer the questions. Most information in the passage is irrelevant to answering the questions. Rather, the questions generally ask for specific information. So, you need to first identify where the needed information is buried, dig it out, and then decode the sentence with the information correctly. For questions that include “suggest,” you will need to extract multiple sentences in the paragraph that talk about the same thing and then combine them to infer something not mentioned. Additionally, you need to be able to decode meanings in unusual sentences with subjunctive moods (counterfactuals) and sentences with trigger words like “even” and “only,” which often conceal hidden or opposite meanings. This course teaches you how to recognize these hidden clues and interpret challenging sentences correctly.

🔹 Some question types require a very specific approach, especially Sentence Insertion and Paraphrase questions. For Sentence Insertion, you need to understand academic writing style, which follows strict logic and precision. You’ll learn various methods for logical transitions of ideas that are crucial for answering Sentence Insertion questions. For Paraphrase questions, you need to understand how ideas relate to each other, such as cause and effect, and how to weigh different pieces of information. In this course, you will learn common relationships among ideas and how to phrase them correctly according to their level of importance, which is crucial for answering Paraphrase questions.

🔹 And finally, you need to learn how to recognize traps in answer choices. TOEFL deliberately makes wrong answers look tempting—like a siren’s song—while the correct ones seem less obvious. If you’re not aware of these traps, you will fall for them, choosing the wrong answer. This is infuriating because all your effort goes to waste. This course teaches you how to identify various traps TOEFL sets and avoid them so you can outsmart the test makers.

Through learning these strategies, we train you to develop an instinct for spotting wrong choices and recognizing what correct answers look like. This “feel” for correct and incorrect choices is especially helpful when you’re running out of time—particularly for the summary question, where eliminating just a few wrong choices is often all you need to get the correct answer.

Practice Like the Real Test: 100+ TOEFL-Style Passages

Learning strategies is just the first step—to truly succeed, you need realistic practice under test-like conditions. This course includes 100+ TOEFL-like reading passages and timed exercises to help you:
✔️ Improve both speed and accuracy
✔️ Get used to time pressure, so you stay calm on test day
✔️ Identify and fix weak areas before the real exam

By practicing under pressure conditions, you’ll find that when you take the actual TOEFL, it will feel much easier.

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