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One of the major issues that I have with the majority of TOEIC materials on the market
is that they’re based upon the idea that you learn to do something by doing it.
For example, if you want to learn to play tennis, the idea is that you get out on the tennis court
and you hit ball after ball after ball and eventually you do it.
The idea by extension with the TOEIC is that most textbooks seem to have the idea that
if you want to learn to do the TOEIC you just do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of questions.
And basically how this translates into the classroom, is that they do 30 or 40 questions
and then the teacher goes through and analyzes their mistakes – specifically mainly in most cases they are grammar mistakes.
Now the problem with this is that it misses out on a huge part of what I think is being tested on the TOEIC.
It doesn’t focus on things like the listening and reading skills that are essential.
Basically it’s a listening and reading test, so you need to work on these skills.
You need to work on things like skimming and scanning so they can read through the passages quickly.
You need to work on underlying listening skills like prediction and basically being able to understand
paraphrasing and things like that.
Just doing lots and lots of practice, you may be able to pick out some of these things somehow by osmosis,
but without these key elements of the listening skills and the reading skills and especially test taking strategies
which are dealt with in most materials on the market but in a fairly perfunctory way.
I think there’s a lot of underlying stuff that needs to be addressed that most current course books don’t address…
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Basically for low level students, it would seem to almost be a no brainer that those would be an obvious choice.
The main reason being is that the TOEIC, even though its aimed to be accessible from very low level ability to very high,
unless you are about a good pre-intermediate, the majority of the test is going to be very, very difficult.
So for low level students, ideally we’d like to use practice materials that are at the level of the test.
But for lower level students they just find it too difficult, especially if you’re doing nothing but practice activities.
Because what you find is that you do thirty questions and the students can’t understand more than half of them.
It’s very demotivating, very frustrating, and basically doesn’t get very good results either.
So basically all those, ‘Target 550’, ‘450 for the TOEIC’, what those materials do is
they simplify the actual materials they present the students with.
They use simplified vocabulary. They use shorter reading and listening passages.
They limit the amount of grammatical structures the students see.
And this makes it much easier for the students to actually approach these kinds of tests.
And so basically for many years, I used these types of materials and in fact, the students have a much easier time going with it.
For teachers of course, it’s much, much easier to run these kinds of classes.
Students don’t struggle.
Basically it seems to make this kind of intuitive sense for teachers that you try to choose
the materials you’re using in the class to match the level of your students.
All in all, it would seem a win-win basis, except for one thing.
And that’s when the students go to take the real test, they find that the real test,
in no way resembles what they’ve been practicing with for the last few months.
And what I’ve actually come to believe is that these simplified materials do more harm than good for these students.
Not only do students not make any significant gains, but in terms of the frustration factor, it becomes almost a shock.
I’ve had students come back to me and say
"Teacher I studied for three months in your course but my score went down by 15 points. You’re a bad teacher."
I can understand totally. What am I supposed to say in a situation like that? It’s frustrating for them.
It’s shocking for the teacher when you know they’ve actually learned a lot but in terms of actually preparing them
for the nature of the challenge they’re going to face, you’ve actually failed them.
So I can’t do it anymore.
Basically what it came down to, for many years I was asked to write materials of that nature for low level students.
And I constantly said "No I’m not doing it". Basically by using these materials you’re shooting your students in the foot.
You’re giving them this placebo effect but in fact you’re not helping them at all.
All you’re doing is taking their money, wasting their time, and basically not giving them good value in return.
The thing that changed my mind is that finally it came to my attention that the TOEIC
is broken down into roughly about three equal parts in terms of difficulty.
One third of the test items are aimed at lower level students,
one third are aimed at the intermediate range,
one third are aimed at the higher level range.
So it occurred to me that in class rather than simplifying the materials unnaturally,
what we could do is we could basically,
in each unit we could start off and present them with materials that could actually appear on a real TOEIC test
but would be on the easier end of the range in the early parts of the unit.
You have to expose them to material that’s on the actual test or else when they face it on test day they’re going to shut down.
But in order to do this, you have to take a systematic build up approach
and work on those underlying skills of vocabulary, any sort of grammatical features,
test taking strategies, the listening and reading skills necessary to approach that.
If you build up that sound basis, then you can expose them to the level
they're going to face on the test and they have a decent chance of doing it.
Otherwise it’s going to be meltdown on test day.