A new version of the TOEIC Listening & Reading test was released in 2006. The changes can be summarized as follows:
Overall, passages are longer.
Part 1 has fewer questions involving photograph descriptions.
The Listening Section hires speakers of English from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and North America, and uses an equal distribution of the dialects. However all the voice actors for the speaking test have lived in the United States for an extended period.
Part 6 no longer contains an error-spotting task, criticized as unrealistic in a corporate environment, instead adopting the use of a task wherein the test taker fills in blanks in incomplete sentences.
Part 7 contains not only single-passage questions but also double-passage questions wherein the test taker reads and compares the two related passages, such as an e-mail correspondence.
According to a survey conducted in 2006 by the Institute for International Business Communication, 56.8% of the respondents who took both the older and the revised versions of the TOEIC test in Japan find the latter version more difficult. The lower the score the test taker achieves, the more marked this tendency becomes. As many as 85.6% of those who earned scores ranging from 10 to 395 points find the revised TOEIC test more difficult, while 69.9% of those who earned 400 to 495 points think this way, as do 59.3% of those who earned 500 to 595 points. Among those who achieved 600 to 695 points 58.9% agree with these findings. 700 to 795 points 48.6%, 800 to 895 points 47.9%, and 900 to 990 points 39.8%.
2006 also saw the addition of TOEIC Speaking & Writing tests. In 2007 there were additional changes to the TOEIC Reading & Listening test that decreased emphasis on knowledge of grammatical rules.