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Michael Buckhoff’s “7 Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT

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Vocabulary, vocabulary, and more vocabulary: that’s what you will get when you take the TOEFL iBT. Whether it is academic or campus-related, the TOEFL iBT will throw a plethora of words at you on the reading, listening, speaking, and writing sections. For you to emerge victorious in this great battle of wits will require that you use as many weapons from your arsenal as possible. One such weapon to help you beat the test is to increase your knowledge of affixes: prefixes, roots, and suffixes.

Since it is a certainty that you will never be able to learn all the words in the English language and since it is unavoidable that you will encounter new words on the TOEFL iBT, you will often need to make educated guesses as to the meaning of unknown words. One such strategy is to use part of the word to help you understand the meaning of the whole word. Many words can be broken down into smaller meaningfully units such as prefixes, roots, and suffixes. On some occasions, you may not know the meaning of the whole word, but you many know the meaning of some of these smaller units. For example, do you know the meaning of “anti,” “pre,” and “il.” How about within the context of antibiotic, preclude, and illicit?

Students have trouble with learning vocabulary to the extent that, for every ten memorized words, eight are forgotten. For many learners, learning vocabulary is a constant battle of memorizing and forgetting. Another issue for English learners is that they do not divide the words into smaller meaningfully units and use those smaller units as clues for understanding the whole word. In order words, these learners do not have vocabulary strategies. Unfortunately, their TOEFL iBT scores suffer.

To improve your vocabulary fluency, you should make a study of prefixes, roots, and suffixes as part of your vocabulary study. Regularly studying these affixes can help you to decrease the amount of time needed to memorize vocabulary words. Case in point, “anti” as you may know means “against;” therefore, if that prefix precedes the root “bacteria,” you should not be surprised that antibacterial soap is a chemical that kills bacteria. Let’s say there are 1000 words in the English language that begin with “anti.” So, just by knowing the meaning of “anti’ can help you to predict the meaning of a thousand words. Consequently, regularly studying affixes can expand your vocabulary knowledge beyond your wildest dreams.

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Michael Buckhoff’s “7 Step System to Pass the TOEFL iBT

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