Lindsay McMahon
"The English Adventurer"
Jessica Beck
"Director of IELTS Training"

You’ll get two simple signposts that you must know to get higher listening scores.

Two tips:

1) Stress and intonation matters!

Paying attention to stress and intonation on the Listening test can help you get the answers. If you hear the person on the CD strongly or unnaturally stressing a word it will be an answer. This is built into the test. They encourage people to do it when they are recording. Listen to the episode to hear the example we talk about.

 

2) Distractors

This is a negative trick that IELTS uses a lot.

A: Which restaurant are we going to?

B: Let’s go to Indian. I haven’t had it in a long time.

C: Oh Indian food. I am so sick of it. Let’s go to a Mexican restaurant.

The answer would be Mexican restaurant.

Here you can pay attention to the tone of voice when person C says, “Oh Indian food.”

It becomes clear that the answer will not be Indian food and that you need to keep listening.

Don’t stop listening and move to the next blank when you think you have an answer.

 

Don’t take notes on what you hear during the Listening test. That is a huge mistake.

You should start to pay attention and use these tricks then take a bunch of practice tests when you have the strategies that you need.

 

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