I found a copy of Kaplan’s TOEFL Pocket Vocabulary from 2018, and thought you guys might like a quick review.
Here’s what you get in this book:
- Thirty lists of words, containing 600 words in total. Each includes a definition, sample sentence and other forms of the work (adjective, verb, noun, adverb, etc).
- Twenty-one lists of idioms, containing 420 idioms in total. Each includes a definition and sample sentence.
- A handful of fill-in-the-blanks multiple choice exercises to help you remember the above.
- No TOEFL practice questions.
This is probably a useful book, though some people might find the vocabulary a little too easy. For your reference, here are the words in list 23: attitude, level, repel, uniform, trend, function, comment, lecture, emphasis, analysis, hypothesis, circumstance, strategy, tradition, regime, target, era, authority, generation, hierarchy.
As you can see, some of those are “advanced” vocabulary, but others are pretty basic. I suppose this means the book is suitable for an intermediate student.
More valuable, perhaps, is the collection of idioms. Most ESL students will be able to learn quite a lot from those lists. I don’t usually recommend the use of idioms on the TOEFL, but I know a lot of students (and some teachers) are obsessed with them.
If this book doesn’t appeal to you, I also recommend the “Barron’s” TOEFL Vocabulary book. It contains somewhat more technical words and accurate TOEFL practice questions.