TOEIC Listening

Know your enemy…

TOEIC facts

- Listening is 45 minutes, 4 sections.

• 10 -990 points• Score needed for certain jobs

• Hours of study needed to reach your target score

Skills needed for TOEIC

• Know the test format, instructions, Q types• Time management• Information processing – Preview Q’s and As before listening– Predict answers

• Awareness of distracters• Awareness of dialects• Awareness of natural changes (going to – gonna)• Awareness of how language is actually used• extensive vocabulary and grammar knowledge

Listening strategies for comprehension sections

– Answer quickly as you listen– Preview next Q’s & A’s while you wait for next

passage– Listening first and considering the question later

won’t work because there is simply too much text to remember.

– Answers may use different words from the passage Ex. “I want my money back.” becomes “He wants a refund.”

Benefits of Dictation1. Dictation makes the students and the teacher aware of the students' comprehension errors--phonological,

grammatical, or both. In English, typical errors include the frequent omissions of bound morphemes such as:The -s plural / The -'s possessive / The -s third person singular / The -ed ending for regular past participles.

2. Dictation shows students the kinds of spelling errors they are prone to make.

3. Dictation gives students valuable practice in note-taking. ESL college students may already be in courses in which they must take notes of lectures delivered in English at normal speaking speed. While no one should take lecture notes that are exact transcriptions, learning to write spoken language quickly is an essential college skill.

4. Dictation gives practice in correct forms of speech. Note: We have all read student compositions with grammatically correct sentences that are not correct forms, for example She is a surgeon of hearts or He is a good cooker.

5. Dictation can help develop all four language skills in an integrative way.

6. Dictation helps to develop short-term memory. Students practice retaining meaningful phrases or whole sentences before writing them down.

7. Dictation can be administered quite effectively by an inexperienced teacher.

8. Knowing how to take dictation is a skill with "real world" applications. Many jobs demand accurate understanding of spoken orders (phone agents, dispatchers, administrative assistants, etc.). Also, the U.S. citizenship exam requires examinees to take a dictation.