TOEFL Writing Work Sample

Candidate ______

TOEFL Writing Work Sample

• Description of the TOEFL Writing task

• Description of the TOEFL Writing Work Sample

• Examples of writing items

The TOEFL Writing task

One part of the Writing section of TOEFL assesses the examinee’s ability to write in response to a two-part stimulus on an academic subject. The stimulus consists ofa reading passage followed by a recordedlectureon the same topic. After reading the passage and listening to the lecture, the examinee is directed by a ‘prompt’ for a written response. A typical prompt is “Summarize the points made in the lecture, being sure to explain how they cast doubt on the specific points made in the reading passage.” The stimulus and prompt together constitute the writing item.

The reading passage part of the stimulus is between 250 and 300 words long. It begins with a brief introduction that explains an issue, practice, position, theory, or explanation. The reading states a thesis, that is, a position in favor of or against this practice, issue, explanation, etc., and then presents threeclear and distinct arguments that support the thesis.

The lecture is on the same topic as the reading, and rebuts each of reading passage’s three arguments. The lecture does not restate (though it may allude to) the arguments of the reading, but it presents arguments of its own that “line up” with and counter the specific arguments presented in the Reading. The lecture script is no more than 300 words.

There are three sample items in the final section of this document. Note that after each of the items there is a table of the “key points.” This is not seen by the examinee. The key points are written by the item writer as a guide for the raters who will score examinees’ written responses.

TOEFL Writing Work Sample

Each applicant for an internship in the TOEFL Writing summer institute is required to submit a Writing Work Sample. The work sample has two parts.

Part I: Write an item

Write a reading + lecture stimulus with three point/counter point pairs based on one of the two sources provided below. You must use this source material, but do not provide a key points table for the item you write using it.

Part II: Produce a table of key points [See examples of items] for a possible item based on the remaining source. Produce the point table only.

Both the item and the key points table should be put in a single Word document with a title in the form of “last name first initial TOEFL Writing Work Sample” and submitted to

Elizabeth Jenner

Summer Institute Coordinator

Be sure to include a contact email and phone number

General advice on writing your item.

Clarity, simplicity and directness: These are primary virtues that can take precedence over completeness of coverage or nuances of a position or argument. Sometimes there is an interesting or important argument that must be foregone because it cannot be delivered with sufficient simplicity or because the reply to it cannot be made simply and directly.

Distinct: The distinctness of points/arguments should be maximized. Of course, each of the three arguments supports the same thesis, but consistent with that, each point should be as distinct as possible. [E.g. in an item about global warming, three different arguments about carbon dioxide concentrations will all blur together in the examinee’s mind. So one argument about carbon dioxide, one about retreating glaciers, and one about the geological record.] In practice, the desideratum of distinctness may force not using a good point/counterpoint because it would infringe on the idea of another point pair.

Arguments: An argument is not just an opinion. For each individual point there has to be a basis, grounds, evidence for the conclusion (the thesis). The rebuttal of the lecture is not just a contrary opinion, and the rebuttal cannot ignore the reading argument. Each of the three lecture rebuttals has to engage the reading argument of the corresponding point. It has to undermine the evidence, or provide an alternative explanation of the evidence, or take issue with an assumption explicitly or tacitly made in using the evidence to support the Reading thesis. One can call the accuracy of the Readingevidence into question, “new data suggests that...”, but one cannot rebut the reading argument just by disagreeing with the argument’s conclusion.

Take into account the fact that the examinee will hear the lecture only once. So the lecture in particular needs to be clear, simple and straightforward. Do not use difficult vocabulary and be sure as part of the exposition to provide a brief gloss of a technical term that cannot be avoided.

In general, each individual reading point (and each the lecture counters) should constitute a single argument (reply), not a family of separate points (replys).

Do not try to cover all the material in the source or even on a given point. It is generally necessary to simplify the issues. The point of these items is to provide a basis for assessing the examinee’s ability to write, and we can’t do that if the response limiting factor is the complexity of the reading passage and lecture.

Source material for your work sample:

Source 1

On the controversy of what caused the megafaunal extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene

Source 2 (presented in full below).

“TheCase of the Servant with the Fur Collar”

The New York Times

September 22, 2005 Thursday

By CAROL VOGEL

Why was she wearing fur?

That was one of the first questions experts asked when they began studying a 17th-century portrait of a woman who had the unmistakably stolid face of a servant but was decked out in a sumptuous fur collar. And why did the light on her face appear to be reflected off the dark surface of that collar when it should be absorbed by it?

These were puzzling questions, since the woman, whose head is covered in a plain white bonnet, certainly did not seem to belong to the class of 17th-century Dutch society that had its portraits painted. Some experts would have taken one look at the canvas and immediately dismissed it as the work of a minor artist.

But when Ernst van der Wetering, the head of the Rembrandt Research Project, saw the painting, he recognized something far more important than her dress.

For more than two years now, the painting on wood panel has been undergoing slow but extensive restoration and study under the care of Mr. van der Wetering and Martin Bijl, a former head of conservation for the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. With scientists’ help, they have concluded that the painting is a Rembrandt from about 1640 that someone tried, a century later, to transform into a formal portrait.

No other experts have seen the painting—until today, when it goes on view at the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam in anticipation of a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the artist's birth in 2006. Now, the theory will be posed to the world’s Rembrandt scholars. The painting is then headed for the auction block, at Sotheby's January sale of old master paintings in New York.

George Wachter, director of old master paintings for Sotheby’s worldwide, has put an estimate of $3 million to $4 million on Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet a conservative figure, since it is not signed and a study. Mr. Wachter said he wanted to let the market decide how much it is worth. (The last Rembrandt to come up at auction was a self-portrait sold to the casino owner Steven A. Wynn two years ago at Sotheby's in London for $11.3 million.)

How Old Woman came to Sotheby’s is a familiar tale in the world of old master paintings. More than two years ago Howard Walsh Jr., a collector from Fort Worth, approached Mr. Wachter to ask his opinion of the painting. He had inherited it from his parents, Howard and Mary D. Fleming Walsh, who bought it from the Newhouse Gallery in Manhattan in 1971. At the time they were told it was a Rembrandt.

Scholars were not so sure. It had been included in an 1836 catalogue raisonne of Rembrandt's work and in a 1915 catalog about the artist. The painting was last published in 1931. After that it was rejected from further Rembrandt catalogs.

“We couldn't sell it as a Rembrandt until we knew more,” Mr. Wachter said. “When I first saw it, I thought it was a beautiful picture, but there was a white haze over the face because the varnish had changed over time. Still, I could see there was a lot of quality to it.”

He promptly sent a photograph of the painting to Mr. van der Wetering, who said he was interested in seeing it firsthand—an encouraging sign, Mr. Wachter said. So with Mr. Walsh's blessing he sent the painting to Amsterdam.

As head of the Amsterdam-based group of experts who have the last word on whether a painting is by Rembrandt, Mr. van der Wetering has examined more than his fair share of questionable old masters.

“We get piles of photographs, but when I first looked at this painting, I couldn’t help but get excited, which is rare,” he said last month as he was standing in front of Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet, which rested on an easel by the window of a conference room at Sotheby’s in Amsterdam. “The execution of the head has a kind of spontaneity.”

He then pointed to some delicate wisps of hair naturally spilling out of the bonnet and the kind of intricate rendering of the bonnet, the woman's ear and her neck, which he said he thought were unmistakably Rembrandt-like. “The execution of the head has that combination of free draftsmanship and painterly execution.” But, he added, the way the light reflected off the collar simply “didn’t make sense.” He was also intrigued by how the artist captured a sense of light falling obliquely from behind the sitter in a way that left her face largely in shadows.

He still could not confirm its authenticity until it had been restored. That’s when Mr. Bijl, now an independent curator, was enlisted. He, too, saw the genius of Rembrandt in the painting. “The first thing I always do is look,” he said in a telephone interview. “Then I start talking with van der Wetering to see if our ideas are the same.”

Peter Klein, a wood biologist from Hamburg, Germany, was brought in to test the oak panel. He discovered that it had come from the same tree as Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait With a Hat” (1633), which is in the Louvre, as well as “Portrait of Willem Burggraaff,” also for 1633, in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, Germany, which has been attributed to the artist's workshop, and a landscape in the Wallace Collection in London that is thought to be from 1640 and was painted by a student of Rembrandt.

By examining the work carefully, Mr. van der Wetering said he and Mr. Bijl could see seams where wood panel had been added to the original painting. The dark background had been painted over so old and new would look as one.

X-rays and pigment tests confirmed their suspicions that in an attempt to make it more salable, someone had transformed the painting into a formal portrait, changing its shape from arched to rectangular and adding a fur collar to make the sitter look more like a lady.

In addition to removing decades of varnish and over-painting, Mr. Bijl also used a Japanese saw (because it is both thin and delicate) to remove the portions of panel that had been added, bringing the portrait back to its original shape.

X-rays showed many layers to the painting. Around the woman’s neck was the fur collar, but under it there was a black layer of paint, and under that what Rembrandt had originally intended: a whitish collar. That explained the reflections, since light could well reflect off a white collar, but not off dark, fur.

“Thinking is the longest part,” Mr. Bijl said. “We had to be sure of each step we took.” After two years of debate, he removed the fur, which revealed the yellowish-white collar. The collar, unlike the whiter bonnet, has a yellowish cast because, a textile expert confirmed, that “poorer people used a kind of starch for their collars that had a tendency to turn yellow, but they used a better type of starch for their caps,” Mr. van der Wetering said. “And Rembrandt was very aware of the difference of these tones.”

The bonnet’s point is folded back in such a way that the ear and the metal structure supporting the bonnet are partially visible. “In our eyes, even though the cap is unusual in the oeuvre of Rembrandt, it could only be by Rembrandt,” Mr. Bijl said.

Only after the fur collar was removed, he said, could he see the reflections of light on the jaw, the cheek and the chin. Another Rembrandt touch: a small spot on the woman’s cheek. In a number of self-portraits the artist added a blemish to his own skin.

Both men were so intrigued by Rembrandt's lighting that they tried to create a room with it. Mr. Bijl then asked his wife to pose to try to determine Rembrandt's complex rendering of reflections and shadows.

In the end Mr. van der Wetering concluded that the sitter was one of Rembrandt’s household servants and that the painting is an oil study he did to experiment with the issue of light.

“Rembrandt was called the painter of light, and rightly so,” Mr. van der Wetering said. “He sometimes used himself as a model to solve particular pictorial problems in front of the mirror. In this case, the problem of the figure lit obliquely from behind was a problem that, in one form or another, occupied him throughout his life.”

[end of source article]

Three Examples of TOEFL Writing items

Example 1

Were Dinosaurs Endotherms?

Reading:

Endotherms are animals such as modern birds and mammals that keep their body temperatures constant. For instance, humans are endotherms and maintain an internal temperature of 37°C, no matter whether the environment is warm or cold. Because dinosaurs were reptiles, and modern reptiles are not endotherms, it was long assumed that dinosaurs were not endotherms. However, dinosaurs differ in many ways from modern reptiles, and there is now considerable evidence that dinosaurs were, in fact, endotherms.

Polar dinosaurs

One reason for believing that dinosaurs were endotherms is that dinosaur fossils have been discovered in polar regions. Only animals that can maintain a temperature well above that of the surrounding environment could be active in such cold climates.

Leg position and movement

There is a connection between endothermy and the position and movement of the legs. The physiology of endothermy allows sustained physical activity, such as running. But running is efficient only if an animal’s legs are positioned underneath its body, not at the body’s side, as they are for crocodiles and many lizards. The legs of all modern endotherms are underneath the body, and so were the legs of dinosaurs. This strongly suggests that dinosaurs were endotherms.

Haversian canals

There is also a connection between endothermy and bone structure. The bones of endotherms usually include structures called Haversian canals. These canals house nerves and blood vessels that allow the living animal to grow quickly, and rapid body growth is in fact a characteristic of endothermy. The presence of Haversian canals in bone is a strong indicator that the animal is an endotherm, and fossilized bones of dinosaurs are usually dense with Haversian canals.

(N) Now listen to part of a lecture on the topic you just read about.

Lecture:

(WA) Many scientists have problems with the arguments you read in the passage. They don’t think those arguments prove that dinosaurs were endotherms

Take the polar dinosaur argument. When dinosaurs lived, even the polar regions where dinosaur fossils have been found were much warmer than today—warm enough during part of the year for animals that were not endotherms to live. And during the months when the polar regions were cold, the so-called polar dinosaurs could have migrated to warmer areas or hibernated like many modern reptiles do. So the presence of dinosaur fossils in polar regions doesn’t prove the dinosaurs were endotherms.

Well, what about the fact that dinosaurs had their legs placed under their bodies, not out to the side, like a crocodile’s? That doesn’t necessarily mean dinosaurs were high-energy endotherms built for running. There’s another explanation for having legs under the body: this body structure supports more weight. So with legs under their bodies, dinosaurs could grow to a very large size. Being large had advantages for dinosaurs, so we don’t need the idea of endothermy and running to explain why dinosaurs evolved to have their legs under their bodies.

OK, so how about bone structure? Many dinosaur bones do have Haversian canals, that’s true, but dinosaur bones also have growth rings. Growth rings are a thickening of the bone that indicate periods of time when the dinosaurs weren’t rapidly growing. These growth rings are evidence that dinosaurs stopped growing or grew more slowly during cooler periods. This pattern of periodic growth—you know, rapid growth followed by no growth or slow growth and then rapid growth again—is characteristic of animals that are not endotherms. Animals that maintain a constant body temperature year round, as true endotherms do, grow rapidly even when the environment becomes cool.