We often tell our readers that practicing some Effective Strategies to Enhance Your Listening Skills for IELTS Success so as to improve your IELTS score is very important for getting into Canada.
But if you want to do well on all four parts of the test, you need to know a lot about the English language in different ways. For this, you need to spend a lot of time learning and training for weeks or even months.
You can only go so far if you only learn from textbooks. If you want to do well on a test like the IELTS, you have to make it a part of your everyday life.
This article shows you how to do this step by step, especially for the Listening part of the IELTS.
Listen to People Talk About The Things You Like.
Think about the subject you did best in when you were in high school. Most likely, these were also the things that you really cared about. This is because we are more likely to pay attention to something if we find it interesting or fun.
Using the same line of thinking for IELTS listening, we can make learning fun by listening to things that interest us.
You can listen to a podcast about anything, like cooking, working out, or the history of ancient Egypt. You’ll find that learning about your favorite subject in English will help you expand your language and make it easier for you to process information in a conversational setting.
This is a very important skill to have because the listening part often involves two people talking about different things.
Because of this, it is important to get used to a conversational format until it feels normal to you. On the day of the test, the recording will only be played once, so you need to pay close attention to every line, phrase, and word.
The accent, The Accent, The Accent!
Even in the same country, there are many different ways to speak English. Even though Quebec and Ontario are close to each other, people from those two states have very different ways of speaking.
So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the IELTS has a lot of different English accents, and you should be able to understand all of them.
This includes the different ways people talk in places like Britain, Australia, the United States, South Africa, India, and Canada.
Engaging with news, movies, YouTube videos, songs, and popular culture from these countries is a good way to learn about them.
Improve Your Words and Spelling
IELTS Listening is all about how well you understand what people are saying. For this, you need to be very good at spotting arguments, shifts in opinion, and mistakes.
More than anything, though, you need to have a big enough vocabulary to understand the ideas in question.
It is very important that you work on your reading skills at the same time as you improve your hearing skills. Explore books, magazines, and newspapers, especially those with academic material.
Pay close attention to how you spell difficult words and look them up in a dictionary to find out what they mean. You can also make your own flash cards or take IELTS word tests.
Do Your Best to Rephrase
On the IELTS, there are often situations where one person, called “party A,” says something, and then “party B” says the same thing but in a different way.
This method is called “paraphrasing,” and many test-takers have trouble with it. It is important to know how to paraphrase, and the best way to learn is to do it yourself.
Try to put simple lines from an article, book, or newspaper (you can even use this one), in your own words. Try to think of other words that mean the same thing, or look for choices online if you can’t think of any.
Throughout this practice, the main goal should be to keep as much meaning as possible. Let’s take a look at an example:
Normal: “The sun was shining brightly this morning.”
Reprashed: “Today, the sun was shining brightly in the morning.”
Work on your contractions and running sentences!
People who speak English as their first language often use contractions and related speech to get their point across quickly. During the IELTS test, you will hear these things in the audio, so it is important to know what they are.
For example, instead of “are not,” a native English speaker might say “aren’t.” In the same way, you can shorten “could not” to “couldn’t.”
When words flow together in a sentence, this is called “connected speech.” For example, you can say “I have to go to the library” as “I’ve gotta go to the library.”
If you practice these five Effective Strategies to Enhance Your Listening Skills for IELTS every day, you will start to see improvement in your IELTS practice scores.
But it’s important to remember that these habits shouldn’t replace your normal study schedule. Instead, they should add to it.
