As most people find TOEIC listening Part One an easy place to pick up points and it comes at the beginning of the exam and so can give you confidence for the rest of the test, it is well worth spending some time and effort thinking about how you can get the most out of it. Below are 100 ideas on how you can improve your score in the short and long term, most of which you can do on your own outside of class:
1. Concentrate on your pronunciation. More than sentences that you would not understand if you read them, most people have problems with sentences in the exam that they would understand if they could read them carefully but have trouble understanding quickly when listening to them from a native speaker speaking at natural speed. Working on your own pronunciation is the best way of making sure you recognize English words and sentences when you hear them in the TOEIC exam.
2. Buy an electronic dictionary that speaks. If you can get a dictionary that has different accents you can also use that to make sure you are familiar with American accents (most of the test) or British and Australian accents (some parts of the test that people who have only studied American English can find difficult).
3. Learn homonyms. Homonyms are words that have the same spelling and pronunciation but totally different meanings, and so have different entries in a dictionary. These are sometimes used in the exam to try and fool you into choosing the wrong answer in Listening Part One. You can find lists of homonyms on the internet, and learning the more common ones can also be a good way of learning similar words that you didn’t know.
4. Learn homophones. Sometimes a question will try to fool you by using a word with the same pronunciation but a different meaning in that sentence to the thing you can see in the picture. By learning words that sound the same but have different spellings you can make sure you recognize each word in its context in the sentence. Learning words this way can also help you get the pronunciation exactly right.
5. Practice minimal pairs. A similar trick is to have a wrong sentence that has a word in it that has a similar but different pronunciation to something in the picture, e.g. “first” and “fast”. Practicing the pronunciation of these pairs of similar words will also help with your general listening comprehension and speaking.
6. Count the syllables. As learning the sounds of a language can take a long time and be difficult without a teacher and/ or special software, a good way to start improving your pronunciation and so listening comprehension is to count how many syllables (beats) there are in every word you learn. You can then check in your dictionary and try saying the word with that many beats. You can mark the number of syllables on each word by drawing a little circle above the vowel of each one.
7. Learn word stress. The next stage is to learn which of these syllables is pronounced longer and louder than the others. Again, you can try and guess this from reading or listening to the word and then check it in your dictionary. You can write this down by making the circle above the stressed syllable bigger than the others, or just underlining the stressed syllable. If you write words with the same number of syllables and the same stressed syllable down in a list, this can help you practice and learn them.
8. Learn the phonemic script. The final stage in learning the pronunciation of English words and therefore making sure you understand them when you hear them is writing the pronunciation of the whole word down. The only way of doing this accurately is to use the special “phonemic script” symbols (if you use the spelling of your own language to do it you will not be able to write down the difference between minimal pairs). As this can take some time to learn, you can start by just trying to write the one difficult sound of each word down and then check if you have used the correct symbol with your dictionary.
9. Practice short forms. As all the voices in the text are using natural speed and rhythm, you will very rarely hear full forms like “I am” or “I would have done”, but rather short forms like “I’m” or “I would’ve done”. Using these when you are speaking can improve your fluency and stop it seeming like you are overstressing what you are saying, but more importantly will make sure you can understand those forms when you hear a native speaker using them.
10. Learn connected speech/ how words connect together. Now you have learnt the short forms of grammatical verbs, in order to understand fast, natural speech you will need to look at how other words are changed when they are spoken next to other words. The easiest one to understand is how a consonant (b, c, d, f etc.) at the end of one word joins with a vowel (a, e, i, o etc.) at the beginning of another, e.g. the words “between us” when spoken at natural speed can sound like “betwee nus”. You can practice this and see how it affects a TOEIC exam listening by marking the places on the tapescript where you think this happens with a loop between the words and then listen and read to check.
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