It’s pretty obvious that Listening skills are the most essential skills you should possess to clear IELTS listening test. To get desired band score test taker should follow certain strategies while preparing every module for IELTS test. These strategies are applicable and utilizable by both IELTS academic and IELTS general training test takers in IELTS preparation.
- Discussing about strategies for listening, we should start with the most effective strategy, Prediction. This strategy helped a lot of IELTS test takers to clear Listening test in IELTS feasibly. Before you start listening to the recording, 30 seconds break will be allotted to you to go through your questions. You are suggested to make use of this span of time to analyze the questions thoroughly and predict what could be the answer. Doing this can actually helps in identifying the relatable answer to the questions from the recording that is being played as you’ve already did a prior analysis on questions. Try to memorize 5-6 questions in one time within allotted 30 seconds span to save time while searching answers in the recording.
- In Listening test, the questions are given in various formats like multiple choice, fill in the blanks, Table completion, labeling diagrams, etc,. So it’s better to have some awareness on different genres of questions and how to deal with them.
- Spellings are one of the most salient factors in English language. They can either make your writing attractive or ruin it. You have to write your answers in the listening test, so make sure you don’t commit any spelling mistakes in your answers as all your efforts can go in vain if you commit any. A spelling mistake can entirely change the essence of your answer even though you got it right. There are some words with double consonants like parallel, assess, possess, some words with silent letters like column, knowledge etc, similarly there are many kinds of words in English on which you have to practice a bit with special focus in order to make your spellings flawless.
- In listening test, many test takers failed in identifying answers from the recording as the speaker uses “paraphrasing’’ in recording . Paraphrasing is nothing but replacement in words of a sentence with the words which brings the same meaning. Speaker might confuse you by some paraphrases where you cannot relate the concept of question with the recording resulting in waste of time in searching answers. So, it’s suggestible that you should be practice paraphrasing skills.
- Being patient and attentive in listening test is very important; the answer in the recording which you feel like suitable to the question can sometimes gets amended by the speaker. You might miss the correct answer if you are not attentive, so be attentive in order to catch every change made by speaker in recording.
- The speaker uses different kinds of accents in recording as IELTS is an international test. You can hear the voice of the speaker in different kinds of native accents, as English is the official speaking languages in many countries. So you need to explore various ways to get knowledge about different accents in English, so you can easily detect the answer irrespective to the accent used by speaker in recording.