IELTS Lesson #11 - Listening 5 - Strategies 1

IELTS Listening test has various question types. We need to tackle them in different ways. Some of the most basic things to do for improving your listening abilities are suggested as follows.

• Watching English Content everyday like movies, series etc.
• Watching Interviews can help you understand conversations better.
• Watching TED Talks can be less boring to the youths which helps to understand lectures in Section 4.
• Listening to news is also a good way to practice listening English Content.

Listening abilities do not improve in a day or two. Hence, it should be a part of your daily habit to indulge into something in English. This is the natural way of learning or improving listening.

Besides the above mentioned strategies, IELTS Listening Tracks are easily available on youtube. And, because IELTS Listening test is only 30 minutes long plus 10 minutes time to transfer answers, you can manage 40 minutes a day. But, I would suggest you to have a hard copy of it to practice because it is easy to underline and scribble.

However, in most of the cases, candidates are found to practice listening test without using 10 minutes transfer-time effectively.

TRACK YOUR PROGRESS

Many candidates are found to practice IELTS Listening consistently while not actually correcting their mistakes. Hence, I would suggest you to have a track of your progress.

Following should be taken into consideration to track your progress.

1. Re-listen your wrong answers and correct them. This avoids repetition of the mistake of similar nature.
2. Be careful about the pronunciation of numbers that are similar. Such as, fourteen and forty.
3. Be careful about the numbers like contact number, dates, money etc. They generally make corrections on these to test the candidate’s ability of listening.
4. Make a table including your total score, types of questions and their corresponding scores. This helps you to understand your weaknesses.
5. Once you have found your weakness on a particular question type, you can simply practice more of those.
6. If you are consistently scoring in a particular range like, 25-28 or something else in practice sessions. That symbolizes your possible score in the examination.