Customer Reviews

KAPLAN SUCCESS WITH WORDS FOR THE TOEFL: THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY GUIDE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS (Success With Words, Vocabulary Guides for Students and Professionals)

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this book is unlikely to meet students' and professionals' needs and expectations, maybe because it's trying to do two distinct things at once: prepare students for the TOEFL and help readers incorporate the words into their active vocabulary.

TOEFL prep is probably best served by drill, and this book offers a useful division of vocabulary into manageable chunks.

actually incorporating vocab into your daily speech, however, is quite a different task, and this book offers little in that direction. i find both the 'conversation' and 'short talk' components to each chapter to be quite stilted and unnatural sounding--the exact opposite of the kind of model the target audience actually needs. reading a newspaper and a good novel and then discussing them with others is more likely to produce lasting vocabulary growth.