How to Improve Your IELTS Listening Score through understanding your mistakes.

How do you improve your score in the listening paper of the IELTS?

Well, the best way is to spend hours and hours listening to diverse materals like TED talks, movies, podcasts and various other ways of hearing natural voices - the way English is naturally spoken by native English speakers, like you'll hear in IELTS listening.

But that takes a lot of time.  Aren’t there any tips or tricks? Some short cut I can take. 

Well, no. There isn't. However, analyzing your mistakes is often said to be an effective way to improve listening in relation to the test. Yeah, okay, but analyze them how? 

This is all good advice. Keep in mind that there are different types of listening errors, and by know what type of error you’re most prone to making, you can tailor your future listening based on what you’re doing wrong.

In the audio exercise I posted a couple of days ago, I gave you four utterances and asked you to write them down.

Here’s a shorter version of the listening.  The last two columns are automated listeners: Windows 10 Speech Recognition and a new app I'm rather impressed with called Otter.ai

 

Here’s a table with your guesses. 

Pretty good!

Column 1 represents a "connected speech" error. In English, we run our words together a lot, and "So, what do you want to do later?" sounds like "Wajuwannado later". I think the best advice there is to learn what the missing words in connected speech usually

Column 2 is an example of a "lexical" error.  You can't rightly be expected to get "My budgerigar has an overwhelming sense of ennui" if you don't know what budgerigar or ennui are. Here, once again, vocabulary is the basis on which IELTS success is based. I'm not sure budgerigars are capable of feeling ennui, but there we are.

Column 3 is an accent or regional dialect error. Although you won't ever be asked to identify what the words "fair dinkum" or "barbie" mean in an IELTS listening test, do try to figure out if any of the various acccents you'll hear on the test give you particular problems. Simply due to lack of exposure, I've found that students have trouble with the Scottish and Australian accents in particular. Once you've identified the accent that gives your trouble, google "Best Austrlian Films" or just watch Trainspotting over and over.

Column 4 is a parsing problem. Although there were other issues in that relatively easy one, everyone except the computer put down "everyone" in their answer. Everyone, as I'm sure you know, means "all the people"... She's going to eat all the people?!?  Every one "all the things"... the apples.  If you listen again, now I'm sure you'll here the small pause between every and one.

So there we are, folks I hoped you enjoyed the listening lesson. Next time you're practicing, when you review your mistakes, think about what kinds of mistakes they are


*Credit for this goes out to Mr. John Wheeler. His teacher-training workshop was the basis of this lesson.