Do I need to take the TOEFL?

dreamupsided0wn
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:52:27 +0000

I was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1992 and came to America when I was 4 years old. At that age, I spoke Ukrainian and Russian. When I started Kindergarten, I spoke barely any English. About a month later, I spoke English better than the rest of the kids so my school told me I could skip ahead to 2nd grade. For some reason my mom thought I would be a sociopath if all of my friends were two years older than me so she only let me skip ahead to 1st grade. Since I started school, English has always been my best subject. I’ve participated in writing competitions, won spelling bees, taken Honors/AP courses and electives in English throughout high school, my highest Reading/English scores on the ACT were 34/32 (10 on writing), and my PSAT scores for reading and writing were in the 700s. Linguistics has always been a talent of mine, and I do not struggle with English whatsoever. But that doesn’t make me a native speaker…

Do I REALLY need to take the TOEFL?

(I thought about just saying that I AM a native speaker, but I feel like that takes away an important and unique element of my application… and I already wrote an essay about being bilingual that I really don’t want to rewrite.)