IELTS Listening

Introduction

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is a popular standardized test used to measure the proficiency of non-native English speakers. It assesses the language abilities of candidates in four key areas: listening, reading, writing, and speaking.

In this blog post, we will focus on the IELTS listening section, which is the first section of the test. The IELTS listening section is designed to assess the candidate’s ability to understand spoken English in a variety of contexts, ranging from conversations and monologues to news reports and academic lectures.

Table Of Contents

Introduction
Marks
Time
Sections
Types of questions in Listening

Marks

The IELTS Listening module consists of 40 questions each carrying one mark. These 40 questions are divided into 4 sections each having 10 questions.

Time

In total, the 4 sections take 30 minutes. After that, 10 minutes are given to transfer the answers to the answer sheet and check the answers.

Sections

There are 4 sections and the questions start off easy with listening to section 1 and get slowly difficult until you get to section 4. The first and second sections are based on social situations whereas the third and fourth sections are related to an educational or training context.

Section 1: In the first section, there is a conversation between two speakers generally on social context which is in most cases completing or filling up a form. The examples of section 1 are: discussion on membership of a library, sports club, or gym, opening a bank account, seat reservation in a hotel, enquiry about the transport system.

Section 2: This section is basically a monologue i.e. a speech by one person and generally the speech is based on non-academic social context like a speech describing the facilities and arrangements of a holiday camp, giving travel information to the tourists, a speech on the radio describing features of a product, a customer service official giving information to a passenger about railway service, a museum agent describing about the main attractions.

Section 3: In section 3, there is a conversation where up to 4 speakers discuss on educational or training context. Examples: a researcher discusses his work with a group of students, a student talking to her teacher about a draft proposal she has written for a competition, a tutor talking two business students about their research on managing individuals, a discussion between a professor and two students about their dissertation, two students discussing a marketing assignment they are working on together.

Section 4: The final section is also a monologue like section 2 where a speaker describes or delivers his speech on an educational topic. For example, a lecturer talking about farming in ancient England, part of a lecture about the history of moving pictures, a talk about a project on wildlife, a lecture on business culture, part of a lecture about a problem related to the behavior of certain sea creatures, a talk about scientific research in the continent of Antarctica

Audio clip: There will be time to read the questions during the test. Before the audio clips are played, examinees are allowed to look at the questions for a few seconds before each section. The examinee has to answer the questions while listening. The audio is played only once.

No. of words: The number of words for the answer is written on the question paper before each type of question. Correct spelling is essential as the misspelled answers are considered wrong.