Sorry for doing it this way, misc.education.language.english, but I'm not sure this went through to the author.

Does anyone have some practical tips for teaching the popular and revised TOEIC exam? I want to avoid a dry "drill and kill" approach to
the standardized exam, but I have only had limited success using the textbook "Target Score" from Cambridge. I'm using my own conversation book, Compelling Conversations: Questions and Quotations on Timeless Topics, for supplemental conversational exercises, but the students really need a far more specialized text to improve their test scores. Other suggestions?
As some of you know, the Test of English for International Communication contains several sections. This multi-hour exam, although designed in the United States by ETS to test English skills in the workplace, has become extremely popular in Europe and Asia as a
validator of English speaking, listening, and reading skills. White collar professionals expect to take it, and a few points can mean the difference between getting hired or being overlooked for a job or promotion. For worse or for better, it's seldom used in the United States outside off college campuses. The standards also far, far exceed the language requirements for naturalization as a United States
citizen.
If you have had experience teaching a TOEIC class, please share your tips. I'm feeling a bit under-prepared and don't want to disappoint my
students.

Teaching TOEIC is not the most difficult thing in the world, but as you have discovered, helping students beat the TOEIC is not a simple matter nowadays, and there are many approaches out there. This is likely to change as the TOEIC gains prominence in the world market, but it will take a good deal of time.
It would be nice if you could simply teach general English skills plus a tactic or two to help students pass examinations like the TOEIC, wouldn't it? Yet, since your paycheck depends in large part on either your perceived or real effectiveness in the classroom at helping the students in the classroom beat the particular exam that they are preparing for in the least painful manner for the least amount of money, this view of test preparation as nothing more than a subsection of general language teaching does not hold much water. Everyone who teaches these classes, rather than promotes these standardized tests as a valid measure of language ability, is in the same boat.

In a larger sense, all successful standardized test prep, as far as I've been able to determine during the course of my career, is very much a matter of poking holes in testing pundits' and promotors' arguments for the validity of their tests.
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The general sermon for language learners reading this article aside, let's get into the next phase of what you really need, assurance that I know what you're talking about.
The TOEIC has 200 multiple-choice questions: 100 Listening items to be completed in 45 minutes, and 100 Reading items to be completed in 75 minutes. There is no break between the two sections, and that means that students sit in the same chair for two hours and rack their brains for answers. There is no writing section and there is no speaking section. The score for each section ranges from 0-495, for a combined total of 0-990. Generally speaking, companies and national/ regional agencies set cut scores, as they do on all Educational Testing Services products.
ETS publishes a list of can-do statements for certain levels, but in my view most national or private agencies responsible for setting the cut scores tend to think in terms of IELTS scores, which are based on an entirely different scale of 0.0 to 9.0. It is not impossible to find that an MA program in some country run by some greedy natives accredited by, say, the University of Indianapolis in Hoboken, New Jersey and/or the University of Lancastershireton-West Surreyville Downs Parish may accept either a 7.0 IELTS score or a 700 combined score on the TOEIC. The two are not even remotely comparable.

There are 4 parts to the Listening section, always referred to in official ETS documents in Roman numerals as Part I, II, III, IV, and three parts to the Reading section, always referred to as Part V, VI, VII. This tends to add to the general confusion of test-prep instructors confronting discussions on how to prepare for TOEIC. If you get confused anywhere below, please come back here to this paragraph to figure out what I'm talking about. After a few hundred hours of leading TOEIC test prep classes, it'll become second nature to think about the test in these terms.
For the TOEIC, well, you have been using a UK test book for TOEIC, an American test, The problem with every UK TOEIC book that I've seen is that they focus on a more British, Cambridge ESOL/UCLES view of language learning rather than on what the TOEIC actually tests. Country-specific or region-specific materials usually fall even shorter of the mark because the creators of these materials usually produce them in a hurry and their focus is on making the books look like the TOEIC exam in a very superficial manner, rather than on spending time making sure the content of their practice tests reflects what's on the actual TOEIC.
To better illustrate this, look closely at the way your UK book helps students prepare for Part V, and Part VI of the TOEIC. Is the focus on fill-ins and error-correction more on classic language teaching grammar issues, such as relative clauses, conditionals, and proper tense usage, rather than the simpler subject-verb agreement, word order, or verb+preposition collocation items that actually appear on the test?
If you can, get your hands on a regional book and look at the Part VII reading passages. Are they all letters, notices, memos, and e-mails, or can you find some reading passages based on general interest magazine or newspaper features? For some reason, the fantastically- underpaid ghostwriters who put together these books tend to insert passages on US Navy whale migration surveys and famous presidents in their Part VII items. Their questions, even when they get the content of the passages right, do not reflect Part VII's focus on skim-and- scan answer choices. Even worse, you will probably find that the questions tend to follow the order of the text, Cambridge ESOL Main Suite-style, another no-no for TOEIC.
And finally, you might look at US-written TOEIC test-prep materials. As an American, I must regretfully say that as far as the TOEIC goes, US publishers have completely dropped the ball because they know little or nothing about how to teach English as a foreign language abroad, rather than a second language in-country, and test preparation in general is where that difference in focus really shines forth in all its ugliness. It would take a master of apologist hypocrisy to justify the mediocrity of US-written language teaching materials for the TOEIC, which as you pointed out is practically never administered in the US.
In addition, as you most likely already know, real test materials are extremely thin on the ground. There is, however, an Official Test Preparation Guide in its second edition, designed for self-study, but the cost seems ridiculous, about the equivalent of 40 dollars for a not-so-thick manual printed on the cheapest of pulp paper and three CDs.Buy it, beg it, steal it, do murder for it, if you are really serious about learning how to help students beat TOEIC. ETS, the company that administers the TOEIC, grudgingly hands out other test items to promote their test, but the Official Guide is the source of the only real two full-length tests in existence. As a general rule in test prep, do not trust anything but the real thing when setting mock diagnostic tests. The methodology used to pre-test ETS items and set up indices of difficulty for questions and compilations of items is far more stringent than that any publisher, even one as large and reputable as CUP would use.

Dismiss any claims you may run across that the items in a practice test book have been pre-tested; unless they are accompanied by written proof and analyses, such claims are not worth the paper they are printed on.
I'm not saying that the ETS Official Guide is perfect, but it's at least fifteen times better than anything else I've seen on the market. Since it's a self-study book, you can't use it with students, and that's your real problem, no?
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And now, for specific recommendations.
BOOKSI would recommend Oxford University Press's practice test books once you do the two real practice tests out of the Official Guide with your students. You should really get to know the test and you'll need a great deal of teaching experience before you can successfully adopt their coursebook, which I've found is not very well put together. Oxford's test books, based on my experience and my records, are significantly more difficult than the actual TOEIC overall, although students find some of the tests in them far more difficult than others.

The books do a good job targeting the right words students need (please do not buy the cheap US-written books specifically designed for this purpose!), but the OUP books' items in Parts V and VI do fall far short of what is actually tested on the TOEIC. They focus too much on formal grammar, as mentioned earlier, such as conditionals, relative clauses, proper use of tenses, etc.

FIRST WORD OF ADVICE
Throughout your preparation for listening, focus, focus, focus on actively building the students vocabulary. After years of watching how they work, I can confidently say that the mamby-pamby, feelgood- inferring-from-context gurus who infest our profession never get real results in anything as specific as test prep. Actively pester your students to keep TOEIC vocabulary and lexis journals. Keep after them. I'd say vocabulary skills, specifically, knowing the business-context words and phrases tested on the exam, is about 50% of beating the TOEIC by raising a candidate's score 200 points or so. 25% is specific test-prep skills, and only the last 25% is what is generally called language proficiency or competency skills. More than any other language proficiency test I've ever seen, the TOEIC can be beaten by a competent instructor, but it takes real work.
I've had some success in mentioning this fact in the first days of class. The difference between a candidate who raises their score 50-80 points from a month-long 40-hour TOEIC class and a candidate who raises it 200-300 points is working hard to learn vocabulary and lexis. Candidates who fall in love with what you will present as your clever strategies employed in each part can improve their scores will fail to reach any significant goals they set.
The fastest way for students to learn a good amount of topic-based vocabulary in a short period of time is translation. They will most likely not retain these words, but for most of them, it will not matter. You can try to pretend that you are teaching English for general purposes when you do test-prep, but rest assured that the students will not pretend that they appreciate your insincere efforts when they get their test scores back.
LISTENING
In your test-prep classes, because of this vocabulary problem, you have to focus on beating the listening sections with lower-level learners before you tackle the reading sections. Listening employs a much more limited, and hence more learnable, set of lexis. Specifically, if you have a candidate who can't do more than 12 out of
20 right on Part I, the photos, do not expect a Reading score higherthan 300. Most students will immediately pick up on the importance of previewing the pictures in Part I and anticipating content questions, but even so, get the idea out there that candidates should preview the questions and actively anticipate what they're going to hear before the person on the CD starts talking.
For Part II, it is extremely important to get students used to the idea that they have to listen to the first words of the question immediately. If it's a who, where, where, when, why answer, students should anticipate that, most likely, one of the answer choices will give a yes/no response to the question. Once you mention this fact, the candidates in your class that looked at each other and blew raspberries while you talked about the importance of previewing might give you a second look.
For Part III, use the backwards method. Explain very clearly that if students do not look at the questions and answer choices BEFORE they hear the question, they are not likely to get the answer right. Have students look carefully at the length of the answer choices. If the answer choices consist of four single words, the candidate is likely to hear a number of those choices, e.g.:
Question in booklet:
When will Mr. Barnett arrive in Munich?
A.Monday
B. Tuesday
C. Wednesday
D. Friday
Short conversation on CD:
A: Do you know when Mr. Barnett will be here?
B: Well, he'll be landing in Frankfurt on Monday, but it'll probably take him a day to unwind before he shows up here in Munich.

Part IV: Do not expect anyone who is not gunning for a score of over
700 on the TOEIC to get more than 9/20 questions right. Conversely,anyone who gets 19/20 right on Part I, 25/30 on Part II, and 25/30 on Part III will most likely score at least 15/20 on Part IV. Strategies for Part IV seem to work best on students who are somewhere in the 700-800 range, are not that weak in Reading skills, and already have a beat-the-test mentality. What I use is complicated and takes a good deal of work to put together for 20 questions, so I would simply do what most people do and let those 20 questions go as they may. You can spend your teaching time more fruitfully on other parts.

READING
Don't expect miracles here if you only have a limited amount of time available. The key here is vocabulary, again. I don't spend much time on grammar. Teach them the tricks that you isolate from your study of the materials in the Official Test Prep book and leave it at that.

In past observations, teachers tend to start talking and chalking when it comes to Part V and Part VI. I've always felt that if you start whipping out a conditionals lesson in a TOEIC class, or what you use to deal with omission and inclusion of relative pronouns, you've lost the game. Perhaps five in the sixty questions in Parts V and VI will deal with those issues.
Because materials are as bad as they are, I have occasionally resorted to my old TOEFL PBT materials for upper-level students. The old TOEFL PBT Structure is a good indication of how this section works, and the strategies in old TOEFL PBT books occasionally yield spectacular results. The problem is that at least half of the questions in these sections depend on the candidate's understanding of vocabulary, and the focus of the TOEFL (academic) and the TOEIC (business) is indeed different, even though ETS promoters tend to fudge the difference to increase their profits. For typical lower-level TOEIC candidates, who will just wants to pass this language test and get on with their lives, attacking a sentence on how poetry is composed for error correction, such as:
Blank verse in iambic pentameter is MADE UP WITH five iambs in each line, or ten syllables.
will not be seen as an appropriate classroom use of their time and money.
And lastly, we get to Part VII, the reading passages. There is nothing in any other major standardized language test that I've seen that will effectively prepare students to face this section of the TOEIC. There are three things that you need to focus on: getting students to recognize the text type, be it a letter, a memo, a notice, an article, or whatnot, improving their skimming skills in the context of this test, and improving their vocabulary.
The easiest way to deal with this, but not the best, is to tell students to briefly look over the text (especially the line at the top that states what kind of text it is), go to the questions, and work backwards.
If, however, you expect to effect change on the order of a 200-point increase or more in your students' TOEIC scores, you will need to be able to teach skimming and scanning, not in the general, advice-heavy and technique-light way that most teachers tend to use in imitation of what they learned in their general language teaching classes, but in a carefully prepared, structured way that gives students real advice that they can apply to the actual texts they have in front of them under the time restraints they will be under during the TOEIC test. This is not easy, and it would take as much time for me to give you my way of doing this as it would to tell you about how I teach students to deal with Part IV of the Listening section.
LAST WORD OF ADVICE
Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. Stop and drill. Make up worksheets. Review. Translate. It will ruin the pace of your lesson, but get the vocabulary working until the students hate you. It will make you feel that you are betraying your honorable profession (and will also force you to learn a lot of the language of the country you're working in, horrors!), but the more-than-slightly-sleazy and illegitimate world of professional test prep demands that you get the job done, rather than natter about how terrible the system is. With luck, the people you are preparing to pass these tests will have the brains to change their systems someday and we will understand that translations of actual language ability into largely arbitrary codes, scales, and numbers is an iffy proposition at best.
James Karaway