I am starting at a new university in April. I will be teaching a TOEIC course twice a week. I don’t have any experience with teaching TOEIC but I got a textbook called TOEIC skills 1 by Abax. I will be teaching about 20-30 freshman low level students per class.
Just taking a quick look through the textbook, the vocabulary words look very, very difficult for freshman beginner level students. It also just looks boring in general. Just straight up listening and reading exercises. My teaching style is very communicative and I don’t tend to do long listening exercises or careful detailed reading focusing instead on main ideas.
Is there any way I can make TOEIC fun / communicative for students using small groups?
9 comments
Why do you want to make it fun? Make it useful first: if the students learn things and get higher TOEIC scores, you’ll have done your job and everyone will appreciate the class much more than if students simply smile and talk a lot.
An approach vis-à-vis vocabulary difficulty I’ve found fruitful is having students study both word root and affixes: point such out when they come up during class, in the textbook, and in practice tests.
If you’re adamant about having students work in groups, perhaps assign them groups of questions to solve and explain to the rest of the class or to some other members of the class.
No
The thing is, TOEIC is a test, so by it’s very nature it isn’t communicative. You can’t approach it in the same way you’d approach teaching conversation.
TOEIC is meant to increase their test-taking skills, not their speaking skills, so you have to take a more discrete-point approach.
You want to show them how to “beat” the test, and increase their score regardless of how much English they understand. This is a known factor in TOEIC – that you are teaching a set of techniques to use in passing a test instead of teaching language.
And that is why TOEIC is so stupid and useless. 🙂
In other words, it’s going to be boring no matter what. The students need to be made to understand that to pass a test, you have to study some really boring shit. That’s adulting.
Of course, you can try to make it fun by playing vocab games or doing jigsaw reading tasks and such, but really, TOEIC is just dry, dry, dry.
‘Had fun’ isn’t a learning outcome.
Shouldn’t really be designed to be ‘fun’, but your lessons should always be interesting and engaging.
What works for me is showing students a gradual increase in their score. Depending on how much time you have, develop a plan where you can let them see tangible improvements.
That’s motivates them more than anything.
Actually used that text book before… it’s ok a pretty standard toeic textbook … try to make some interesting activities with the vocabulary… maybe have the students try and make sentences in pairs… have them read over the listening scripts together…
Doesn’t have to be ‘fun’ but can make it interesting…
If you are teaching a TOEIC class, you should be focusing on making sure the students understand the types of questions on the test and how to take the test. You teach the techniques of the test.
Actually improving their English is kind of a separate thing.
You really need to make sure that you understand all aspects of the test such as time management, skimming, searching for the types of questions asked, etc. etc.
For the real difficult words, prepare pictures beforehand on a powerpoint and have the students infer what the words mean. I tried to find silly pictures as much as possible too. It really broke up the monotony in teaching a test class.
Sometimes I will show a 15-20 second funny video associated with the word/idea/concept, but that was tougher lol.
Late to the party but I think most of the comments here covered the broad points.
Seems like an odd textbook to go with. But the teacher’s manual has a couple ideas in the beginning pages – the rest is just an answer key. One good thing is they have a quiz for each unit, which is essentially mini-TOEIC.