Finding TOEFL-like passages to practice for TOEFL Reading is reasonably easy—just find a nice medium-length article on an educational website, or read excerpts from first and second-year college textbooks. Finding good passages to prep for TOEFL Integrated Writing is a bit trickier, but here is a nice guide to gathering good prep material for this task.

Finding appropriate practice reading for TOEFL Integrated Writing

…is a little harder. In TOEFL Integrated Writing, you’re asked to read a passage that is short—but not too short. You won’t get the extremely brief 1-2 paragraph blurbs seen in TOEFL Integrated Speaking. But Integrated Writing passages aren’t anywhere near as long as TOEFL Reading Passages either. In terms of actual content and topic development, think of Integrated Writing passages as a simplified “digest” version of the TOEFL Reading format—you’ll get the same range of ideas on a subject, but in a shorter format with fewer supporting details.

The passages for the Integrated Writing Task are intellectually demanding enough that you definitely will want to do some relevant, appropriate practice reading. And you’ll want the reading to be comparable in some ways to reading practice for the TOEFL Reading Section  The trick is to find educational articles that match the Integrated Writing passage’s themes and particular length— articles that are 250-350 words long and cover a variety of academic subjects.

Recommendations for Practice

Skysports, Popular Science, CNN, and BBC​ are the good place to look. Many of this website’s articles are very TOEFL-like in terms of vocabulary level, subject matter, and academic tone. All of them fall within the Integrated Writing passage range of length or very close to it.

Newsweek is also pretty good for this kind of TOEFL Reading Practice. Granted, in some articles the vocabulary level is very similar difficulty of the average TOEFL Integrated Writing Passage. This can be a plus in its own way though—if you need to build your vocabulary up as well as practice reading for the TOEFL Writing section, NewsWeek can help you start at a vocabulary level that meets your learning needs.

In general, any 200-500 word educational articles written at an intermediate English level are useful. Other good websites to check out include The Week, Discover Magazine, Time ​Magazine for Kids, and the Short, Sharp Science Blog. And you really don’t need exactly​ perfect matches to Integrated Writing’s passage format. These kinds of near-equivalent sources can help you get in some good practice with reading comprehension.