Method
The subjects were twelve students who took the TOEIC course offered for the first year students as one of the elective courses. TOEIC listening test and a common examination for all the other English courses were given after the twelve times of the classes. The results of these tests were compared with the other students’ who did not take the TOEIC course. A questionnaire with 9 items was given to the subjects for the improvement of the program.
Description of the subjects
The subjects were 12 students including 1 non-Japanese student who took TOEIC Practice as a regular elective course for the first year students at Tokyo Polytechnic University.
The course is basically available for all the students studying at TPU, but in the first year of the introduction of TOEIC Practice was open only for the first year students for their credits because of the Act of Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. The specifications about the subjects are in Table 1.
Description of the course
There were thirteen classes in total during the three months. The first and the last class
were spent for the TOEIC examinations.
Textbooks
The following three textbooks were used. The first two were composed of the questions, the answers and the explanations for the answers. The first one has the similar questions originally made by the author and this one follows the style of the new version of the TOEIC test. TOEIC examination changed the forms and the styles of the questions from the first term in 2006.
In this paper, all the tests given to the subjects followed the old style as the official version of the college TOEIC given in the first term took the form of the old one. The second textbook had real questions from the old TOEIC tests given in the past.
There were three sets of the real but old tests, answers and explanations for them. The third one contains 1080 words frequently used in the TOEIC test.
1) Masatoshi Shirakawa. Preparation for the New Version TOEIC Test. ALCpress Inc. 2005.
2) George W. Pifer, Hideaki Honda, Tetsuo Kimura. TOEIC Test Super Moshi 600. ALCpress
Inc.1996
3) Chizuko Tsumatori, et. Al., Word Master Approach for the TOEIC Test. Seibido. 2004.
Syllabus of the course
Week 1 Introduction of the course and the initial test. Distribution of the textbooks.
Week 2 Challenging the listening part of the TOEIC test.
Week 3 Challenging the reading part of the TOEIC test.
Week 4 Explaining the contents of the test of vocabularies and the first ten vocabularies and sample sentences. Challenging Section 1 and Explanation of the problems in the section of the text 1.
Week 5 The test of vocabularies. Explaining the contents of the test of vocabularies and the first ten vocabularies and sample sentences. Challenging Section 1 and Explanation of the problems in the section of the text 1.
Week 6 The test of vocabularies. Explaining the contents of the test of vocabularies and the first ten vocabularies and sample sentences. Challenging Section 2 and Explanation of the problems in the section of the text 1 and 2.
Week 7 The test of vocabularies. Explaining the contents of the test of vocabularies and the first ten vocabularies and sample sentences. Challenging Section 2 and Explanation of the problems in the section of the text 1 and 2.
Week 8 The test of vocabularies. Explaining the contents of the test of vocabularies and the first ten vocabularies and sample sentences. Challenging Section 3 and Explanation of the problems in the section of the text 1 and 2.
Week 9 the test of vocabularies. Explaining the contents of the test of vocabularies and the first ten vocabularies and sample sentences. Challenging Section 3 and Explanation of the problems in the section of the text 1 and 2.
Week 10 the test of vocabularies. Explaining the contents of the test of vocabularies and the first ten vocabularies and sample sentences. Challenging Section 4 and Explanation of the problems in the section of the text 1.
Week 11 The test of vocabularies. Explaining the contents of the test of vocabularies and the first The Effect of a Three-Month TOEIC Training Program 3 ten vocabularies and sample sentences. Challenging Section 4 and Explanation of the problems in the section of the text 1.
Week 12 TOEIC Test Listening part. The common examination.
Week 13 College TOEIC test