According to Professor Tom Cobb, Department of Linguistics at the University of Quebec, "Until recently, vocabulary learning was seen as peripheral to language acquisition. ?Much of this view has now been reversed. studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s showed that vocabulary skill and knowledge are the precondition for most other language abilities and, in addition, the main source of variance in the final state of such abilities." Many students spend a lot of time learning the techniques of passing TOEFL and TOEIC. But even if they pass they still have difficulty with English at work or at school. There is a better way. Most of the questions on TOEFL and TOIEC require a familiarity with the phrases of English and a rich vocabulary in the subject matter that will be tested. LingQ is specially designed to prepare you for TOEFL and TOEIC. The Linguist helps you do two things.
Learn Phrases: The most frequently used words of English account for about 80% of most English language content. Many of the conversation items in the Linguist Library have an even higher percentage of high frequency words, exceeding 90%. You should spend a lot of time on these easier articles in order to fully master the most common words of the language.
But there is a more important reason to work on these easier articles. With fewer difficult or new words you can concentrate on observing phrases and saving them for review and study in the LingQ system. If you can master a lot of natural phrases you will get better at using prepositions, articles, verb tenses and phrasal verbs, without having to remember rules of grammar.
Enrich your vocabulary: For you to do well on TOEFL and TOEIC you will need a vocabulary of up to 10,000 words. This means that you may have to learn as many as 8,000 new words. Not an easy task. Fortunately Professor Paul Nation of Victoria University, New Zealand has developed a highly useful Academic Word List of 570 essential words. To enrich your vocabulary, focus on those articles in our Library that come from business or academic sources. These will consist of from 5 to 15% academic words. You can even cut and paste from specialized web sites and import content to LIngQ. Then you can save new academic words to your LingQ database for review and study. LingQ will keep a record of your vocabulary growing every day, as you come across these words in different contexts.
Remember that when you select an article for study you should first click on the title. LIngQ will tell you how many words in the article are new to you. This will help you choose content that is just difficult enough but not too difficult.
Please email me with any comments about TOEFL and TOEIC at steve@thelinguist.com.
