Developing the skills necessary for the TOEIC and other English language proficiency tests can be a trying experience for test-takers, so this course has been designed to provide some strategies to develop students’ higher-order thinking skills and stay motivated. Reading Strategies for Test Taking will cover ways for students to improve their TOEIC score by helping them to think through the test and generalize this knowledge across other English language proficiency tests. A heavy emphasis is placed on strategies for learning vocabulary which will help with depth of understanding, much of which is done through sharing connections with other students. There is ample opportunity for the learning exercises in this course to become an opportunity for social interaction and further understanding of a vocabulary item through others’ experiences.
During this course, students will be encouraged to scan for information type questions and judge which words are more important for answering questions, understand the four major types of reading comprehension questions, recognize questions that ask for specific information such as when, where, who, why, and how, learn about questions that ask for meaning of a word or a synonym/antonym of a given term, understand inference questions that require students to take a leap of understanding from the information given in the text to the answer asked for in the comprehension question, and practice answering questions that ask for what is not in the text.