TOEIC vocabulary: learn the words the way the test uses them

Xin chào! Last week's post ended with the students whose score is "average everywhere". Nine times out of ten, the missing piece is not grammar. It's vocabulary, and specifically the narrow, repetitive vocabulary of the TOEIC.

The test has a small world

Nothing on the TOEIC happens outside an office, a shop, a hotel, or an airport. My students' mistake journals point to the same topics again and again:

1. Offices and meetings (agenda, postpone, minutes, attend)
2. Hiring and HR (applicant, qualification, probation, resign)
3. Orders and shipping (invoice, in stock, deliver, refund)
4. Money and budgets (expense, estimate, quarterly, revenue)
5. Travel (itinerary, boarding, accommodation, delay)
6. Property and repairs (lease, tenant, renovation, plumber)
7. Marketing and events (launch, brochure, venue, register)
8. Restaurants and shops (reservation, complimentary, receipt, cashier)
9. Health and safety (inspection, equipment, precaution)
10. Media and announcements (subscription, editor, broadcast)

Ten topics, roughly a hundred words each. That is the whole world. Learn it topic by topic, and Parts 3, 4, and 7 stop feeling random.

Record a word with its partners

A word alone is a fact; a word with its partners is a skill. For every new word, write three things:

• The collocation: not deadline but meet the deadline, extend the deadline, tight deadline.
• The family: apply, application, applicant. Part 5 loves the family.
• A TOEIC sentence, copied from the test where you met it.

Deadline is a fact. "We'll have to extend the deadline" is a point.

Ten a day, every day

Ten new words in the morning, five minutes. The same ten in the evening, from Vietnamese to English, one minute. On Sunday, all seventy in one pass. That's about 300 a month, so one topic every ten days. Hackers Vocabulary and the ETS tests are enough; you do not need a 3,000-word list.

Watch for the paraphrase

In Part 7 the question says reimburse; the passage says pay you back. Whenever you record a word, ask: how else would the test say this? Write the pair down. That one habit is where most reading points hide.

Next week: a fifteen-minute listening routine built on dictation and shadowing. Hẹn gặp lại! 🌸