I think influenza will probably be on the TOEIC test.

After spending all day Tuesday in bed, taking medicine and eating soup, I thought I had enough energy to come back to work on Wednesday, but after the first class, I realized that if I really wanted to get over this bug, I needed to go home and rest, which I did shortly after this class.

We started the class with the unit 3 and 4 quizzes in the back of the book. I was happy to see that many of the students had finished the homework, but unlike the previous week where we quickly finished this section, it actually took half the class this time to finish. Considering my state, I can't say for sure, but students did seem exhausted, too, and considering what I had and what's going around, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them were in the early stages of catching something. Of course, the class is on a Wednesday morning, and if you are anything like me, you are not a morning person.

Anyway, the quizzes, despite taking a long time, are still quite important for the students, and should not be neglected because they need vocabulary for the TOEIC. I think, and I am sure I have already posted this, vocabulary is the biggest factor in improving your score, and I hope that over time my students will come to understand that and not before it is too late.

Once we finished each quiz, I also had them practice the pronunciation with me as well because it can help with the listening component as well. After both quizzes were corrected, we did the mini-test of unit 4 before starting unit 5, which focuses on part 5 or the fill in the blanks section of the test. In this unit we focused on discerning the part of speech being asked for in the question in order to make answer selection a little easier. I first asked some students to give me an example of part of speech and I wrote them on the board. I then had two students read the test tips on the page before asking them to work in pairs to decide which part of speech is required for the answer. We were able to work our way through this and onto the next exercise, which practiced this test strategy a little more when our time ran out.

Due to lack of time we were not able to finish the unit, and so I was unable to assign any homework, although I encouraged them to study the vocabulary they did not know. One thing that I may start doing in this class is giving them extra vocabulary quizzes on top of the homework. I know that it sounds much, but for the TOEIC, which is not an easy test, vocabulary, as well as hard work and effort are important if you want to get that score higher.