Today I want to talk a bit about the TOEIC test as a lot of my students struggle with preparing for this test.

So lets talk about - Beating the error recognition

My first piece of advice here would be to trust your instincts, particularly if you’ve been a smart cookie and immersed yourself in plenty of written and spoken English prior to the test. Read the question carefully and look for anything that feels wrong about the sentence- it might just leap out at you. But, you’ll also need a solid knowledge of grammar, particularly these areas that examiners love to test: subject-verb agreement, matching your tenses, using modals correctly (such as ‘could,’ ‘would’ and ‘should’), gerunds (which end with –ing in English), articles, subject and object pronouns, maintaining the right word order and comparatives (remember: ‘er’ for short adjectives, ‘more’ for long adjectives). Unnecessary extra words appear often, too, such as ‘my sister she is friendly’- if you have used a noun as the subject of the sentence, you cannot then use a subject pronoun as well. They also enjoy changing the gender of pronouns mid-sentence to see who will notice: ‘my brother did it herself.’

So lets aim high and see how we can get 100% in the Listening test!

It is truly possible to score 100% on the TOEIC listening, so time to shoot for the stars! During the photo section it can be helpful to first cross out the incorrect answers. Look carefully for words that sound like what you heard but aren’t the same, and also look for the words you did hear being used in a totally different context. If an answer is only half true then it’s not what you’re looking for, move on! Discount, also, any descriptions that are related to the picture but don’t show exactly what’s happening- if the picture shows people in an office on a break then a description of them working is incorrect- and any where the words you are looking for are used, but in a misleading way. Words often have more than one meaning! Using this process of deduction you’ll arrive at the right response.

Please contact me for 1-1 TOEIC or general English lessons!