A Collection of IELTS Tips for The Listening Test
First, click to test your listening level (by pressing the button above) ....
1, Time: 30 minutes
You will hear four phonemes - monologues and conversations by some natives - and write answers to the questions.
Part 1: A conversation between two people in everyday social context, such as a conversation in a rental agent.
Part 2: A monologue in everyday social context such as a speech on local utilities.
Part 3: A conversation pattern between up to four people in the context of education or training.
Part 4: A monologue on academic topics, such as a university lecture.
-> 7-8 minutes/1part
-> Each question should take you about 35 seconds to answer.
2, Take notes (Important)
First and foremost, you must take good notes as you listen actively throughout the entire listening. Many students struggle with this. They take either no notes--so they miss important information--or too many notes--so they sacrifice understanding and comprehension. No matter what, take notes. Build the skill and you will improve. Every now and then, a student will tell me that they score high and take no notes. They tell me that notes distract them. Immediately I think, well, you would score even higher if you did, but if your score is high enough, don’t change what works for you. However, if you’re reading this, then you want to get the best score that you can, so take notes.
If you find that notes distract you, experiment with your notes. It’s like saying that exercise makes you weaker. Yes, in the beginning it might, but over time it builds your strength immensely and you can’t be as strong as you can be without it. I hope that analogy makes sense.
As you practice, to stay close to the conditions of the exam, don’t review your answers to this section: Remember that the more you create exam like conditions as you practice the more prepared you’ll be for success.
For example, let’s say your notes looked something like the notes below for a fake lecture.
Apples
Red
Delicious
Sweet
Oranges
Juicy
Healthy
Many
And, let’s say that you were asked a detail question.
What are two characteristics of apples that the professor describes in his lecture?
Red
Juicy
Healthy
Sweet
It may be a silly example, but I believe you get the idea. These can be very tricky though when you’re listening to a lecture on an unfamiliar topic with vocabulary words you may not be completely familiar with and notes that are not complete. In such cases, stick to the idea that you should choose answers that come from words mentioned close to the topic of the question.
Answers will usually fall into one of three categories: criticism, neutrality, or support. As a way to ensure that you get these question right, take notes on words that indicate where the professor stands on what he’s discussing. For example, if you hear:
"This always confused me. . ."
He is likely expressing a degree of criticism and we should write the word “confused (-)” with a small negative sign to help us remember if you we need to answer such a question on the topic.
Summary:
You’ll need 4 "A":
A notebook,
A pen
A listening lecture
And the transcript to the listening lecture.
VERY Important
Method 1:
1, Play your listening lecture and listen to just a few seconds and then pause it.
You can refer to the following sources :
Then, write down everything that you heard exactly as you heard it. In this manner, you’ll be creating your own transcript.
Go back to the beginning and listen to the lecture as needed. Make a mental note of how many times you have to go back and listen again before you have all of the words down: 2, 3, 10 times?
2, After you’ve created a transcript for about 3 minutes of lecture, check your dictation with the actual transcript.
You will get:
The first part of this exercise powerfully builds your listening skill.
The second part improves your spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
After 2 months, listening skills will increase from 20-23 sentences to 30-32 sentences.
Time: 60, 90 minutes/1 day
Note:
While you look over the transcript, pay careful attention because you want to notice the words that you misspelled, the grammar that you made a mistake with, and the missing or unnecessary punctuation marks that you may have.
Once you do this for an entire lecture, write in your notebook the average number of times you had to listen to write down each word that you heard. Also, write down the words that you misspelled and put down a few sentences in which your punctuation and grammar were not correct to remind you later when you review.
Do this exercise everyday. As the days go by, you should notice that you’re making fewer mistakes and that the number of times that you have to listen to the lecture to get down every word is decreasing. If it’s not, pay more careful attention and remember that it’s an exercise like any other; you must push yourself to improve from it.
Here’s how it should work:
Hear the words from the Listening that represent one simple idea (one sentence)
Understand the content
Take notes on the content making sure to focus on writing the subject, verb, and object
Make sure that each line of notes is equal to one simple idea
Each line of notes should have 1 to 5 words maximum
Place a small mark at the beginning of every line to keep things neat
Summary:
1, Listening
2, Transcribe
3, Revise
Method 2:
One unique way to build listening skill is to challenge yourself with faster than normal speed speech. To do so intelligently, we've created a short, but powerful exercise to try to develop a stronger ear for English.
Here are the steps:
First, listen to a speech at normal speed
Take dictation as you listen (which means listen as many times as you need to to write down every word that you hear)
Master, practice, and memorize the transcript (dictation) that you created
Then, listen to the same speech at faster speed and follow along in your transcript with your finger to keep pace with the professor
If you lose your place, start all over again and keep doing so until you're able to follow the speaker from the beginning to end without losing your place
Now, listen to the same speech at an even faster speed and use your finger to focus and follow along with every word
Do this as often as you need to until you're able to follow along from beginning to end.
3, Confide:
Always be your companion!-N.T.N
