Teaching Students to Categorize TOEFL Essay Topics

The author maintains that categorizing TOEFL iBT writing topics helps test takers because they will be more familiar with the topics and thus better able to write about them and because categorizing topics requires critical thinking about the topics. Using some of the 185 TOEFL prompt questions and 10 additional prompts, the article explores ways to code and analyze the prompts, illustrating the process with tables.