b.TOEIC

The importance of TOEIC.

A number of Ensisa courses require (for the award of  engineering and textile degrees/masters) that all students pass the TOEIC test of English language competence with a score of 750 (soon to increase to 785  / 990).

To put that target into perspective, it means that in the exam you are aiming at getting more than 80% of the answers correct.  No mean feat!

You are primarily interested in Engineering: understood.  But if that means you are putting English second, then you are likely to have a problem.  Failing your English TOEIC with < 750 means that (even if your engineering subject marks are spectacular), ENSISA won’t be able to give you your Masters award.  The French State’s Education Ministry has decreed that to work internationally ENS Engineering students MUST have this level of English, so there is no debate: no TOEIC 750+ => no award.  In this sense you have to focus very particularly upon your English.

What does the TOEIC exam look like?

First have a look at the Examinee’s Handbook for TOEIC as this tells you all you need to know abou the format, the procedures and also offers some exemplar questions from each section..

Then go to: http://www.toeic-test.org/ to find out.  there you can see all the component parts of TOEIC and practice all the elements and even take on a TOEIC blanc for yourself: all 200 questions of it.   Essentially theere are a number of components according to toeic-test (and you can see thay are right from the TOEIC materials in your library):

• Part I (Photographs – 10 questions)
• Part II (Question & Response – 30 questions)
• Part III (Short Conversations – 30 questions)
• Part IV (Short Talks – 30 questions)
• Part V (Incomplete Sentences – 40 questions)
• Part VI (Text Completion – 12 questions)
• Part VII (Reading Comprehension – 48 questions)

Each question has a multiple choice option (one from four: a / b / c / d) for you to select the correct answer.  The test takes 2 hours, i.e. 120 minutes to handle 200 questions…. « So much to do – so little time »….

To succeed you need knowledge and confidence in the correct use of English PLUS some decent technique in addressing the questions which you can get from working hard to expand and extend your vocabulary and grammatical precision and by taking the opportunity to familiarise yourself with the tests. there are plenty of such practice tests  available online for all seven component parts of the TOEIC, but there are not many entire TOEIC papers.

See:

• http://www.toeic-test.org/  includes one entire 200Q test.
  
• www.englishteststore.net . lots of component part tests but no whole 200Q test.  (Don’t follow the off-page links on this site – look for the TOEIC tests underlined in blue)
• http://www.english-test.net/toeic/. as englishteststore.net, but clearer presentation perhaps.

Active or passive?

Reading and listening or writing and speaking?

So, as you will see from the above, there is NO spoken element to the TOEIC: you will not be asked to speak.  Instead you:

• listen and you strive to understand context and meaning
• you look at images and picture in the test book you are given and consider the options given that best describe the image.
• you read materials to discern what is wrong / what might be missing
• You read documents or articles to understand them in depth so that you can answer questions relating to meaning and nuance.

So, does this mean that your English courses at ENSISA will not require you to speak or indeed to write? an emphatic NO!    Why so?  Because we come to ‘own’ much of what we learn through actually USING it ourselves. How do we USE language?  Mostly in speaking and writing.  So you will be engaging in oral and written production so that you can use your vocabulary, your grammar etc and you can receive feedback.  TOEIC blanc-type tests are all very well, but repetitive testing adds little to actual learning: tests just tell you where you are and how much progress you are or are not making.  Speaking and writing are the keys to learning what you need for the TOEIC.

There is another reason why we will be writing and speaking rather than doing test-exercises all the time: because at work communication is a two-way, active (rather than passive thing): it involves courage, it involves the likelihood of making the odd error but being confident enough to learn from it: communication is ‘live’!

So the speaking and writing we do are designed to increase your vocabulary (general and technical), your contextual knowledge, your grammar, your fluency, your pronunciation all of which feed directly in to the critical listening, reading and understanding skills that TOEIC focuses upon.