TOEFL iBT Vocabulary: Eight Strategies That Will Lead You to the Promised Land!

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Learning a new language poses formidable challenges, the least of which is vocabulary, for it is the cornerstone for becoming proficient in grammar, reading, listening, writing, speaking, and pronunciation. Having a good vocabulary base allows you, in other words, to have a good grasp of the entire language.

 

Having good vocabulary skills is critical to your success during the TOEFL iBT since many answers on the listening and reading parts of the test are restatements. Therefore, you will often need to eliminate antonyms and other types of distractors from the answer choices, and you should choose a synonym that is most similar in meaning to what you have listened to or read. In addition, to avoid plagiarism, you should, using your own words, summarize the reading and listening passages during the speaking and writing sections of the TOEFL iBT. Of course, the only way for you to summarize the sources is by having college level vocabulary knowledge.

 

Unfortunately, many TOEFLers do not have good vocabulary skills. 1). They have had limited experience reading, writing, speaking, and listening to English. 2). They do not have a good college-level vocabulary list from which to study regularly. 3). They have limited knowledge of the tools they can use when trying to determine the meaning of unknown words from their context.

 

By now, you may have figured out that my TOEFL iBT Blog exists to address all of these issues (Do not forget to tell all your friends about me!). Certainly, you can download my 1,700 TOEFL vocabulary list and begin studying that.  Secondly, you can subscribe to my monthly TOEFL iBT Newsletter so that you can get instruction and lessons on how to improve your TOEFL iBT score. For example, in the second issue of my TOEFL iBT Newsletter, I just completed an 80 minute video addressing the following:

 

1. Eight successful strategies to help you guess the meaning of unknown words on the TOEFL iBT. There are reading exercises in which you practice using these eight tools to discern the meaning of many unknown words.

 

2. A discussion of vocabulary and word parts, complete with a looooong list of prefixes, roots, and suffixes accompanied with meanings and example words.

 

This video is so jam-packed full of instruction that you would have to attend a TOEFL iBT class for at least eight hours to get the same information. And with my instruction, you control when you get the information, and you can review it as many times as you like.

 

A point I make in this 80 minute video is that you will always see new TOEFL iBT vocabulary during the test so you need to be able to understand the meanings of those new words without using a dictionary.  Like native speaker college students, high scoring TOEFLers do not know every word in the English language, but they know how to figure out the meaning of new words when they see them, and despite their not knowing these TOEFL iBT vocabulary words, they still score over 100/120 on the test. You too can be one of them!

 

Subscribe to my TOEFL iBT course: http://onlinetoeflcourse.com