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IELTS Listening Practice: Lessons & Tips

These IELTS listening practice exercises, strategies and tips will help you to learn exactly how to achieve a high score in the test. 

Work through each of the lessons as each lesson deals with specific skills that you will need to do your best in the test. 

IELTS Listening Practice Lessons:

Multiple Choice Tips
In this lesson, learn some tips on how to improve your listening skills for multiple choice type questions. 

Dealing with Listening Distractors
In this lesson we learn more about a common way that you are tricked into writing the wrong answer. Learn about this so you can avoid the mistake. 

Map Labelling
Here you can learn more about how to label a map, a task that sometimes comes up in Section Two of the test. Learn about the language of location and other top tips to score well. 

Signposting Language for Section 4
Section 4 is the most difficult part of the listening test. Learn useful signposting language to improve your score for this section.

Pre-Listening Activities - Predicting the Answer
Predicting what you are going to hear is a really important skill that can help improve your listening and increase your score. 

Sentence Completion Strategies
In this IELTS listening practice you will learn some strategies to deal with sentence completion questions.


Listening Test Overview

The IELTS listening test is divided up into four sections, with each one getting progressively more difficult. 

The total time is 40 minutes, with 30 minutes being the test and 10 minutes the time to transfer your answers to an answer sheet after the audio has finished. 

  • Section One is a conversation between two people. It's usually somebody trying to get some information, such as a student speaking to a university administrator about a course or somebody enquiring about car insurance.
  • Section Two is one person speaking about a topic. For example, a tutor explaining a course or a travel agent explaining a tour or holiday.
  • Section Three could be two or three people speaking. Again, an example could be a professor discussing an assignment with two students. 
  • Section Four is one person again. It is usually somebody giving a lecture about a particular topic. 

These IELTS listening practice exercises will provide you with some of the key skills that you need to be successful in each of the section of the test. 

More Listening Resources

Top Listening Tips

If you want a quick overview of some of the most important tips to improve your IELTS listening, then check out these top 25 tips:

If if you prefer, check out this video of some of the best tips:


Practice Tests


Discuss the Test

If there is anything that you are unsure of with IELTS listening that you are doing or you have any other questions about the listening, then go to the forum for an answer.



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