Listening Section

     You can prepare your students for the test and even improve their skills easily if you know everything about it. For instance, how many sections there are, how to avoid common mistakes, and what kind of questions there are. In the following description, you will know the most essential requirements for the listening test.

    First of all, there are four sections in the listening test. Based on the official website of IELTS, each section has its own recordings. The recordings cover topics that the students can encounter on a daily basis and focus on scenarios that could happen in a training or educational setting. The sections are:

- Section 1 - Listening Conversation Between Two People:

This section will include two people having a conversation in a common social setting.

- Section 2 - Listening to a Monologue:

A monologue is presented in a typical social setting, such as a speech on local amenities.

- Section 3 - Listening to a Conversation Between up to 4 People:

This part will be a conversation between up to four individuals that takes place in an instructional or training setting, such as a university tutor and a student discussing an assignment.

- Section 4 - Listening to a Monologue:

A monologue on an academic subject, such as a university lecture.

    On recordings 1 and 3, the students will hear a conversation between two or more people. On recordings 2 and 4, they will only hear monosyllabic speeches. And the students will be asked to provide answers to questions about recordings that range from multiple choice to matching informatiom, features, and sentence endings, as well as questions that require the students to complete sentences, summaries, notes, tables, graphs, or flowcharts. And this is a detailed list of each question:

1. Multiple choice

Multiple choice questions can be answered with one correct answer, or more than one correct answer. You should remind your students to read the question very carefully to check how many answers are required.

In a multiple choice question, where the students are required to choose more than one correct answer they will be given a longer list of possible answers and told that they have to choose more than one answer.

Multiple choice questions are used to test a wide range of skills. So you should train your students skills because they may be required to have a detailed understanding of specific points or an overall understanding of the main points of the listening text.

2. Matching Plan, map, diagram labelling

The students will need to complete labels on a plan (e.g. of a building), or a map (e.g. of part of a town). The students can select their answers from a list on the question paper.

                                                                                                                                                          

 3.Form, note, table, flow-chart, summary completion

The students are required to fill in the gaps in an outline of part or of all of the listening text. And the outline will focus on the main ideas in the text.

4. Sentence completion

The students will then fill a gap in each sentence using information from the listening text. A word limit is given. It focuses on the students ability to identify the key information in a listening text.

5. Short-answer questions

The students are required to read a question and then write a short answer using information from the listening

text. Sometimes they are given a question which asks them to list two or three points. It focuses on the ability to listen for concrete facts, such as places, prices or times, within the listening.

    Secondly, here are tips, applications, and samples for teachers to help students prepare for the test. These are some of the most significant things you should remember when you are preparing your students:

• You should give the students a preview of the questions how they’ll be and about what.

• you should encourage them and tell them to not get nervous if they miss something.

• you should remind them that the recordings are going to be in a British accent.

• The audio will be played only once, so the teacher should tell them to write the main idea of the audio and the important

information such as numbers and names.

• The students should be given some extra exercises in writing to avoid misspellings. They ought to focus on the familiar

words and the common phrases, for example: Verbs, adjectives, numbers, the days of the week, months and seasons,

shapes, Transportation, and colors.

• The students must understand functional relationships such as cause and effect.

   Lastly, listening is a skill that can be improved easily in many ways. There are a lot of applications, websites, and podcasts for students and all of them are worthwhile to use, for instance:

1. Voscreen:

It is selected as one of the best educational app and it is free to learn

and improve your listening in English.

2. Spotify podcasts:

One of the easiest ways to improve the student’s listening is through listening itself! You can listen to a podcast anytime and anywhere. And the students

can get used to the accent while they’re learning new vocabularies.

3. IELTS official website:

To take a look at the questions and recordings from the IELTS itself is a big privilege for your students! They can have an idea about the actual test and they can hear the audio too.

References :

Williams, S. (2023, March 5). How to improve your English listening. IELTS Podcast. https://www.ieltspodcast.com/how-to-improve-your-english-listening/

Jack, H. (2020, May 15). IDP IELTS KSA. IDP IELTS Saudi Arabia. https://ielts.idp.com/saudiarabia/prepare/article-free-listening-practice-questions/en-gb