Listening Tips

6 Step method to better listening skills:

Improving your listening skills requires active (not passive) listening practice. Focusing on understanding what you are listening to is important when you practice listening.

The best method to develop this skill is through combining listening and reading. Find audio examples with a text transcript to check your comprehension after listening.

Step 1: Listen to the audio clip (no reading)

See how much you can understand the general gist and start to pick out key words.

Step 2: Repeat and repeat again (still no reading!)

Listen to the clip again. Based on what you understood the first time, is there now more that you can pick out?
Continue to listen to the clip several times through to see if you can comprehend a little bit more each time.
Only move to Step 3 when you’re not comprehending anything more from the audio. Your goal should be to understand as much as possible from the audio!

Step 3: Read the text

Check your understanding and identify any new vocabulary. See if you can guess the meaning of any new words based on the context before looking them up.

Step 4: Listen with the text

Listen to the pronunciation of phrases and groups of words.

Step 5: Listen a few more times without the text

At this point, you should be able to understand the majority of the clip. Repetition makes it easier to understand the words and phrases when you hear them again.

Step 6: 9 Listening Tips for your IELTS exam

1. Attempt all questions – there are no penalties for incorrect answers. Be careful to not waste time on a question that you don’t know though – guess and move on.

 2. Watch out for plurals in answers. If the question requires a plural answer, a singular answer is incorrect.

3. Answers appear in the order they are heard in the audio. They come quickly or with large gaps between them.

4. Prepare to hear a potential answer that is not the actual answer. This is common when two people are making plans. They first agree on meeting at a certain time, but then one remembers that they cannot so they decide on a new time.

5. Take care when you transfer your answers and pay attention to the word limit for your answers on your answer sheet!

6. Multiple choice answers will ask for a letter (a, b, c, d). Write the letter and not the corresponding answer.

7. When asked to complete a sentence using no more than two words, and the correct answer is “leather coat,” then “a coat made of leather” is incorrect. Same goes for numbers.

8. Hyphenated words (like “part-time”) are considered as one word.

9. A date (1990) is considered one number.

IELTS Listening Tips to predict answers in the Listening Exam.

• You have the opportunity to read the questions before listening to the recording. Take advantage of this!

• The questions can help you determine what type of answer you’re looking for. For example, if you have the following question:
  “He would like to meet in ____________.”

• The preposition “in” clues you into the type of answer you should be looking for.

• The answer in this case has to be either a period of time (2 days), a month (April), a year (2018), or a season (Winter).

Different prepositions will dictate different answers.

Here are some examples:

Preposition	Possible Answers	Examples
at	Time, Part of Day, Place	9pm, dawn,  the restaurant
in	Period of Time, Month, Year, Season	2 days/hour/minutes,  April, 2018, Winter
on	Day, Date	Monday, January 15th  (or 15th of January)
no preposition	Person other	Emily now, at once, tomorrow, next year, this afternoon, person

Improve Your Listening Skills

The IELTS listening test requires you to exhibit your comprehension skills. Listening is a skill and the best way to improve your listening, is immersion in the language.

The IELTS Exam tests your active listening skills, i.e your ability to extract meaning from conversations or speeches. You also need to improve your focus levels in order to improve your listening skills.

An ability to visualise the words you heard is another skill worth developing. The ability to hold information and construct answers in your mind are two other skills.

On IELTSPodcast, Ben often tells his listeners to grab a pen and take notes, this is another form of active listening.

How to Understand Native English Speakers:

Understanding a Native English speaker can be a challenge (especially with scousers!).

English pronunciation is complex. There are over 20 different vowel sounds and they can difficult to tell apart.

It gets harder with fast speech.

Two words may differ by a single sound but have a very different meaning (minimal pairs).

Training your ear to distinguish between the sounds is an important foundational skill.

Native speakers sound like a block of sound!

Native speakers have speech patterns that sounds unique to learners. It’s different from textbook or written English.

If you learn what these patterns are, it will be easier to understand them.

• Pattern 1: Contractions. Using contractions is the normal method of speech Example: “I am” becomes “I’m,” ”did not” becomes “didn’t” etc.

• Pattern 2: Weak Forms. Structural words in sentences are often pronounced as their “weak form” Example: “to” and “you” on their own are pronounced with a long u: sounds. As a part of sentences though, they are usually pronounced in their weak form with short uh sounds. For more on weak forms and their pronunciation, check out the video below.

• Pattern 3: Phonetic Links. Any word that starts with a vowel gets linked to a previous word which makes it hard to hear each word distinctly. Example: “She is interested in it” all runs together and sounds like one word “shezinterestedinit”