A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE FOR IELTS PREPARATION

Listen to Different English Accents: To ensure that you are well prepared for the listening test, try to listen to and watch a variety of different English language media which include a wide range of native English speakers with British, American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand accents. Being able to understand a range of different native speakers will provide you with the confidence you need to ace the IELTS listening test.

Improve Your Listening Skills: Don’t limit yourself to IELTS practice tests if you want to improve your overall listening skills. Practice tests will help you to become familiar with the test format and listening task types but will not do much to improve your overall listening ability. Use more general audio and video materials to increase your skill level. When you are happy with your ability to understand more general material, move on to IELTS practice material to test your skills in an IELTS context.

Listen to English Every Day: If you want to develop your listening skills, you need to practice, and that means listening to something in English every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s just 15 or 20 minutes while you’re travelling on a metro, eating lunch or cleaning your home – make sure you listen to something new every day. You need to hear English spoken naturally in as many contexts with as many different accents as possible. Try listening to or watching news broadcasts from the BBC (UK), ABC (Australia) or CNN (USA) to get exposure to a range of English accents.

Practice Makes Perfect: In addition to listening to English every day, listening to a range of accents, and completing practice exercises for each listening task type, try to complete as many practice tests as possible in the 40-minute time limit. When attempting each practice test, listen to the recording once only and stick to the time limit to ensure that your practice is as authentic as possible.

Plan to attempt a new practice test every few days while you are preparing for IELTS. After completing a Listening practice test, look at the answers and note any incorrect answers or answers that you have missed. Then look at the tape script to work out where you went wrong. This can help you to decide on the aspects of your listening skills that need more work. Try categorizing your errors (for example, grammar, spelling, wrong number of words) to see where you need to focus.

Make Word Lists: Create your own set of word lists for common IELTS topics (for example, accommodation, travel, facilities on a university campus, etc.). The more vocabulary you have, the easier you will find it to understand the speakers on the audio recordings.

Before you hear each of the recordings, look quickly at the corresponding sets of questions to identify the task type and answer requirements (for example, no more than two words).

As you’re reading through the questions, also try to identify a likely context or situation for the recording.

Check to see if there is any information that you may be able to predict: type of information required (name/date/number/price/place name, etc.) type of word required (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) synonyms or paraphrasing that may be used (for example, ‘quarter’ for ‘25%’, or ‘located in the middle of the town’ for ‘town centre’).

Identify and highlight important words in the questions to help you to listen out for synonyms or paraphrases used in the recording. This is particularly useful for questions with a lot of text rather than map/diagram/table, etc. type tasks.

Listen carefully to the introduction to identify the speaker(s) and the situation/context; make a note of them.

Focus on listening for the answers rather than trying to understand every word.

Complete your answers on-screen while you are listening. For some questions, you will need to drag and drop answers into an answer box. Check the Review box to highlight answers that you want to go back to.

Be alert to distractors. These are words and phrases used by a speaker to qualify or correct something they have said, or something said by another speaker. In the recording, a piece of information may be given, and then corrected or changed (for example, the bus leaves at 11:30 – well, 11:31 to be precise).

At the end of each part, use the 30 seconds given to look at the questions in the following section — do not go back to check your answers from the section you have just completed.

In the IELTS on computer Listening test, when the last recording has finished, you have two minutes to check your answers.

If answer options are given as letters (A, B, C, D, etc.), only write the letter in the answer box.

Make sure that you stick to the word and number limits specified on the question paper (for example, no more than two words and/or a number).

Avoid spelling mistakes. Answers that contain spelling errors will be marked incorrect.

Check that your grammar is correct, especially in gap-fill type questions. You may need to change verb or noun forms to achieve this (for example, changing ‘student’ to ‘students’ or ‘give’ to ‘gave’).

You need to type your answers into the boxes on the screen while you are listening. Don’t rely on remembering the correct answers when the recording is over. If you are unable to answer a question while you are listening, make a note of possible answers; use the break in the recording to decide on your answer and type it into the answer box.

If you don’t understand what sort of information you need to listen for, you will find it extremely difficult to identify the correct answer. Make sure that you read instructions carefully, highlight key words, think about possible synonyms and paraphrases, look for clues in the questions, and try to identify the context of the audio recording before you listen.

Make sure that you answer all the questions in the IELTS Listening test. If your answer is incorrect, no marks will be deducted. If you don’t know the answer to a particular question, make an educated guess; by doing this, you are in with a chance of getting a mark for that question, whereas leaving the answer blank will guarantee that you score zero for that item.