TOEFL

MM 03/12/2018

TOEFL is an English examination which tests the knowledge and skills of academic English for English learners whose native language is not English.

In this examination, the subjects would first listen to an audio story around five minutes and then answer several question according to that story. The story is related to the college life such as conversation between the student and the professor or a lecture in the class. Each question has four choices where only one is correct.

(fig..)

Fig. shows an real example in the TOEFL examination. The upper part is the manual transcription of a small part of the audio story. The questions and four choices are listed too.

The correct choice to the question in fig. 1 is choice A. The questions in TOEFL are not simple even for a human with relatively good knowledge because the question can not be answered by simply matching the words in the question and in teh choices with those in the story, and key information is usually buried by many irrelevant utterances. To answer teh questions like "why does the student go to professor's office?", the listeners ahve to understand the whole audio story and draw the inferences to answer the question correctly. As a result, this taks is challenging for the spoken language understanding technologies.