 Hey everyone, Chris here from IELTS Advantage with another mini course. So what we're going to focus on this week is IELTS listening. Many of you emailed me and said that you need a band 8 in listening. A lot of you want to go to Canada and that requires 8777 with the 8 being in listening. So we're going to specifically focus on that this week. We're going to give you three lessons. Before thinking about why people are not getting an 8 or above for the listening test, we need to think about what does the test get you to do? How is the test built? How is the test put together? What are the things that they are actually testing? Well, number one, what they're doing is they're getting you to listen actively. So what do I mean by that? Well, they're getting you to do something while you are listening. So instead of just listening passively and not really doing anything, they're getting you to complete tasks and answer questions and decide what the correct answer is or filling in the correct answer as you are doing things. And that's very, very important. Number two, you're answering questions while you are listening. So you're multitasking. So you're listening, you're reading the question, you're thinking about the question. You might be thinking about the correct spelling. There's multiple things happening at the same time, which is very, very significant. Number three, you're only listening once. So unlike when you're listening in your English class or maybe you're listening to something and you can repeat it many, many times, you can only listen once. Number four, focus for a long, long period of time. The number of students who have never listened to in English for, you know, really listened, actively listened for more than 30 minutes. And the IELTS test is their first time ever doing that is shocking. And number five, you're listening to authentic English, real English. And we'll talk about the difference between inauthentic materials and authentic materials. And number six, you're listening with no help whatsoever. So it's not like watching a movie where there's maybe subtitles or even watching like a TED talk or, you know, a presentation where there's a PowerPoint and there's images to really help you do that. So these are the things that they are doing. And those are the things that you need to do on test day. And are you actually doing those things before test day? So let's have a look at this is very, very important. How do you listen? When you're listening to English, what are you doing? So are you listening actively? Are you actually doing something while you are listening? For the vast majority of people, the vast majority of time, you're not listening actively. You're just listening on the bus or watching a movie and not really thinking about it, just listening, not doing anything while you are listening. Are you answering questions while you're listening? Again, if you're listening to English, most of the time, 90% of the time, you're not answering questions. You're not multitasking. So on test day, when you have to not only listen, but read and think and think about the question and the correct answer, then you're going to be in trouble. Most of the time, you're not only listening once, especially when you're in a like a general English class. And this is nothing. There's nothing wrong with this, but most of the time, when you're doing a listening task in a general English class, the teacher will play it maybe two, three, four times. In the IELTS test, you can only listen once. Number four, you have to focus for a long period of time. So there's a big difference between listening for a long period of time and focusing for a long period of time. You might say, oh, I listened to a podcast last night and it was two hours long, but you might have only been 100% focused on that podcast for 15 minutes out of the two hours. So for most of the time, you're not doing that. Number five, listening to authentic English. Again, in a general English class, if you're using like a recording from a textbook, this is not how most people sound. This is why when people move to like London or Sydney or Toronto, even though they got a very high mark in their listening test, they've no idea what people are saying. It's not because your listening is bad, but you just might have been listening to inauthentic materials. Even if you're watching a movie, that is generally not how people speak to each other in real life. So you're not doing this. And number six, listening without any help. Most of the time, students are using subtitles or if they're watching like a TED talk or something like that, there's images and presentations to help them. So the reason why you might be struggling is because the test is set up in one way and you are doing the opposite, all right? So if you're doing the opposite to what they're looking for, of course you're going to have problems. And why are they getting you to do all of these things? Why do they want you to listen actively and only listen once and listen to authentic English and listen without help? Is it because they're really awful people and they want to be mean to you? No, because when you move to London or Sydney or New York or wherever you're going, you can only listen once to people. They don't care if you're an English learner. You have to listen actively. You are not going to get any help. You're going to be listening to authentic English. So this is representing what it is like to live and work in an English-speaking country. So if you're complaining about this, you're really complaining that I can't understand real English when I move to the country where I want to be. So all of these problems are very fixable. We can solve all of these problems. We need to just start doing these things. So how can we start doing them? That's what the rest of this lesson is going to be about. So first of all, we can do something called active practice. So there's a big difference between active practice and passive practice. So many, many students say to me, you know, I got a band seven in my listening and I listen to podcasts every day or I listen to TED Talks every day or I watch movies all the time. Okay, that's fine, but you're not actually doing anything when you're listening to those podcasts or watching those movies or doing or watching those TED Talks. So instead of doing that, practice with a purpose. And in my opinion, it's better to do like 10 or 15 minutes of active practice than it is to do two or three hours of practice where you're listening, but you're really just, you know, watching, looking at the window while you're on the bus or, you know, listening to a movie or a song or something like that and, you know, looking at your phone at the same time. Do something with a purpose. So this could be, for example, and these are all just examples. There's lots and lots of ways that you can do this. But for example, you could try and focus on vocabulary. When you're listening to something, note down any new words and try and guess what those words mean from the context. And then you're actively focusing on something and improving your language. Or you could focus on grammar. You could set yourself a challenge. Like why are they, how many tenses are they using and why are they using those tenses? So you're thinking about the context, you're thinking about the timelines, or you could, you know, set yourself a task of why did they use superlatives instead of comparatives or why did they use the first conditional instead of the third conditional. And thinking about those grammatical areas that you might need to work on, and that's going to help you. Or thinking about the opinion of someone, let's say it is a TED talk that you're listening to or a podcast. What is the, what are the differences of opinion? Or what does that person think about that topic? Or a really interesting one is pronunciation. So you could listen and think about connected speech and intonation and sentence stress and word stress. So you're actively doing something just like you will on test day. On test day, you're not going to be, you know, thinking about the intonation or sentence stress or things like that, but you are actually doing something and getting into the habit of doing something while you are listening. This definitely will be tested on test day and this might be tested. So vocabulary is obviously very, very important, but they're all good to do. Next, create your own questions. So you probably are familiar with the different types of question on the listening test. So that might be short answer questions or maps questions or multiple choice questions or something like that. If you have a partner or you're in a classroom, what you can do is get a listening sample that can be anything and create your own questions. And this is very, very powerful because in order to create your own questions you have to really, really actively listen and understand the listening sample. So if you don't, you won't be able to create those questions and then you can swap with a partner or swap with other people if you're doing it in a group and then you can discuss the question. So you can say, oh, that was the correct answer because of this or you got the wrong answer there because it was actually doing this. So you're really, really thinking deeply about the listening and you can do this as a collaborative activity if you're doing it with a partner or in a classroom. You can also listen and summarize, which is a very good activity and you can do this by yourself or with a partner but it's easy to do by yourself. Listen to a podcast for 10 to 15 minutes. Podcasts are excellent because they're genuine English, especially when someone is, you know, you have multiple people speaking at the same time and they're just having a normal conversation. There are podcasts which are, you know, just one guy or one girl talking about one topic and it might not be the most natural way of speaking but for most podcasts they're very conversational and, you know, it is a very, very good representation of what you will get when you're moving to a new country. So listen to a podcast, let's say for 10 or 15 minutes and then try and summarize the main points in one to two minutes. So this forces you to actively listen for a long period of time and then you can summarize by speaking so you could just, you know, talk and record yourself if you're with, you know, if you're by yourself or in a classroom you could even have a competition of who can listen and then summarize the best and you can judge each other or you could write a report, you know, a 200-word report and work on your writing at the same time. Keeping tracks, there's three things that we're going to look at. One is before the test during your preparation. One is before you listen because you're going to have a little bit of time before the recording starts and that's really, really important that will help you keep track. And number three, while you listen. The things that you should be thinking about and that's going to really help you keep track and we're also going to look at, at the end, why many people struggle with the last few questions. A common question that we get asked is I just have no idea how to answer the last few questions correctly and we're going to look at why that is and help you out with that. Okay, so before the test, so there's no point in giving you some tricks or strategies to help you keep track if the things that you need to do before the test aren't there. One of the main reasons why you are struggling to keep track is because you're not doing these things before the test. So you might be like, oh, just give me some little tricks or some little strategies that are going to help me. But they're useful and we're going to show you some of them. But unless you do these things before the test, you're always going to lose track and you're never going to be able to perform to the level that you really want. So let's look at a few things that you must do before the test. Number one, improve your listening skills. Many of you say that I'm lost or I can't keep track, but what you're really saying is your listening skills aren't up to the level that they need to be. If your listening skills are below the level that you need to be at, then you're going to constantly get lost. And look at lesson one on how to improve those listening skills and why it's really, really important that you understand the different types of listening skills that are being tested because they're very, very different from the ones that you maybe are used to or the ones that you have been practicing. So check out lesson one for improving that area. Second thing is focus. If your brain was a muscle, so if you go to the gym and you're lifting weights and you're not used to lifting weights, then you're going to struggle. It's the same with focusing on listening. Focusing on listening in your own language is quite difficult for a long period of time. Focusing in a completely different language to your mother tongue is very, very difficult. You need to practice listening and focusing on that for a long period of time and you will slowly build up. As many of you talk about losing focus in the middle of the test or towards the end of the test, that might have nothing to do with your grammar, your vocabulary, your listening skills. It might be just you're not used to completely focusing on English for that length of time and you just build that up slowly, slowly, slowly. Third thing, we also covered this in lesson one which is multitasking. Many of you are used to maybe listening to English but not listening and reading and writing and thinking all at the same time. So this is quite difficult but like any skill, if you practice this skill, it becomes much, much, much easier. So as you can see, these are things that you need to be thinking about months and weeks before your test. Listening skills, working on focus, working on multitasking, a tip or a trick is not going to help with these. You're not going to be able to read top 10 tips on how to improve focus or top 10 tips on how to do this. This is not really going to help you. It's about putting in the work. Many of you don't want to hear that but I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that there's an easy way around that. You need to start doing this months before your test. Range of accents. So some of you might be very familiar with one or two accents but a strange accent comes up. So you will get a range of different accents from the English-speaking world. So that could be Canada, America, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand. So you might be used to say the New Zealand accent and then a Scottish accent comes up or an Irish accent or a Canadian accent and you're just unfamiliar with that. What is the solution to that? Listen to a range of different accents. You're going to need to practice listening so listen to a range of accents. So that could mean it's as easy as googling Australian news or New Zealand news or podcast or whatever. You don't need to become like expertly tuned in to that accent. Just familiarize yourself with it so that it's not a shock on test day. Next vocabulary. Many of you talk about being lost in the test but what you're really saying is I don't understand that word. So if you don't understand a word you're going to be like what does that mean? And then you'll lose concentration or you might not be able to find the correct answer. So improving your vocabulary is absolutely essential. Improving your vocabulary is going to improve your reading scores, your speaking scores and your writing scores. Always be improving your vocabulary. And finally strategies. If you have a step-by-step strategy for all of the different types of question you're going to be familiar with all of the different types of questions and you're going to know exactly what to do. And most importantly if you use these to practice and you implement these then you're taking some of the thinking out of it. So you're going to be doing lots of multitasking. You don't want to be thinking you know where do I do or what do I do here. But if you have a strategy then that's one less thing to think about. You're doing exactly what a proven strategy will help you with. And we'll look at that in lesson three. So preparing to listen. So we've talked about what you need to be doing in the months and the weeks running up to the test. And if you do those things it's really, really going to help you. But when you are preparing to listen so you're in the test the test has begun and before the listening starts you will have time to look at the question and think about the question. And this is absolutely essential. The students who use this time wisely will always get higher scores than the students who don't use this time wisely. It's just a fact. Lots of students are like just you know look out the window or look around at the other students but the students who have their head down and are actively doing things during this time and the key there is actively you need to be doing certain things will have a higher score than the ones just looking at the window at the birds. So there are a few things that you need to be thinking about. One is familiarize yourself with the question because if you're familiar with it you just want to have an easier time. Number two, keywords depending on the question you might be highlighting or underlining or circling different types of keywords that doesn't mean just circling everything you see but strategically thinking about how you are going to find the correct answer. Number three, synonyms because as you know just because it says computers doesn't mean that you'll hear computers it might be laptops or desktops or iPads or something like that. And number four, try and predict what the correct answers are that's really going to help you during the listening test. So let's have a look at this. This is a diagram or a map of a library and what's going to happen is the recording is going to take you through this map and you're going to have to label different things. All right. So the very first thing you need to do is familiarize yourself with the question. Okay. This is a maps question. All right. So there's one, two, three, four, five answers that I need to answer and then familiarize yourself with the actual map. So I'm going to be starting here and they might say, you know, to my left that's going to be this room to my right or next to the librarian's desk straight on to my left is fiction to my right is nonfiction here next to the seminar room beyond nonfiction or beside nonfiction is this room. This is probably going to be the name of a room. This also is probably going to be the name of a room fiction nonfiction. So this is the main part of the library. This is probably going to be another area of the library. So it could be a different type of book. So you are really, really understanding what's going on. And the people that do that are going to score much higher than the people that don't. Then let's think about keywords here. So librarians desk. So they might talk a little bit about that. So that's very, very important. Nonfiction and fiction. So beside nonfiction is a seminar room beside nonfiction is this room. Library area. So thinking about the exact things that they are going to talk about. And then we have this list of words. So synonyms, art collection. So that could be paintings or drawings. Children's books. That could be books for kids or books for young people. Computers, desktops, laptops, iPads, whatever local history collection. History of the local area or history of our town or our town in the past. Because you need to be thinking about all of these because the correct answer might be a synonym. So if you familiarize yourself with these before the recording starts, you're at a huge advantage. And number four, predict what's going to happen. So looking at this fiction, nonfiction, this one is probably another type of book. So probably is children's books or reference books. This could be a room. So art collection, computers, meeting room, tourist information. So you're listening out for these things and you're predicting what is going to happen and that is really going to help you stay focused on what you need to do and you're not going to get lost. Because it's much easier like say you're predicting that this is children's books and they say walk straight on. Here you'll find fiction and nonfiction and you'll also find kids books. You know exactly what's happening which is much, much easier to do versus not doing it. I'm sure you'll agree. Now you're not going to have a lot of time but you will have enough time and it's about using that time wisely. And when you're practicing take it very, very slow at the beginning. You don't need to do everything at exam speed in the beginning. When you're first learning how to do this take it slow and think about what you're doing and that will really, really help you master this skill of preparing before you listen. During listening. So this is more tactical about thinking about the actual problem. So let's say you have five questions. One, two, three, four, five. So what happens is you might get stuck on this question. So this question, no problem. You get a straight away. This question, let's say it's a multiple choice and you're unsure if it's A, B or C. Let's say they have three very, very similar meanings. The meanings all kind of sound the same to you. You didn't really catch that purse what that person said or it was a strange accent or something was not right where you couldn't really understand what's happening. So if you focus too much on this one then this question is going to come then this one, then this one. The recording is not going to stop. The recording will not stop because you can't find the answer and remember you'll only be able to hear it once. So if you focus too much on this one probably going to get that one wrong. You're probably going to get that one wrong. You're probably going to get that one wrong. And these three might be quite easy for you but because you focus too much on this one you kind of destroyed your chances with these. And these could be very, very easy marks. So you need to be a little bit tactical when it comes to a question that you find difficult. Question that you would normally get lost in and you would lose track. You could just mark the answer that you think is most likely or you could put like an X beside it marking the fact that you need to come back to that later and you weren't 100% sure about it or you could just guess the answer and move on. That is much, much better to do one of those tactical things. So mark the one that you think is probably the correct answer and then you can confirm it later. Just guess the answer. You're not going to guess every answer. We're talking about being tactical with ones that you're lost you find really, really difficult or you could just mark it that you need to come back and think about it later or make some notes quickly and then move on. And then that will mean that you have maybe a 50-50 chance of only getting this one correct but you increase your chances of getting these three. Whereas if you focus too much on this one you have a 30% chance maybe of getting it right one out of three but then a 0% chance for all of these because you have no idea what's going on. So it's about being a little bit tactical and strategic and at the end of the day most of you do not need to get every single question correct. So when I give this advice to students they don't like it because they say no, no, I want to get this one correct. It's like you don't need to get 100%. Do you need a bad nine? No. So why are you trying to get a bad nine? Obviously you want to get as many of them done as possible as many of them correct as possible but let's think about how the actual listening test is set up. There are four parts part one, part two, part three, part four, ten questions in each part and they start off being quite easy and then they get more difficult and more difficult and more difficult and more difficult until we get to here where you get the most difficult questions well why is that? Well here we have band zero so if you get none of them correct you get a zero but if you get all of them correct you get a band nine. So these last questions are to separate out the band nines from the 8.5s these questions are to separate out the 8.5s from the 8s these questions are to separate out the 8s from the 7.5s. So many of you are worrying about the last questions when you're never probably going to get them correct. So my advice if you need a band eight would be focus on getting as many of these as possible try and get 100% in all of these areas which you're more than capable of doing if you're aiming for a band eight and then these ones try and get as many of them as you can but if you're not at a band nine level which most of you never will be and there's nothing wrong with that you know most students will be very very happy with an eight get as many of these as you can but don't worry if you always get the last couple wrong because that's the way they're set up. What we're going to look at first are common problems when it comes to multiple choice questions so with my students what I like to do when it comes to reading questions and listening questions is identify the common reasons why people make mistakes so that they're aware of those and they can you know avoid those on test day so there's some very very common mistakes that people make and common problems that people have when it comes to multiple choice questions. So the first one is that when you are looking at let's say you get a question like this and one could be home one could be office one could be at a depot they might not they might talk about all three of these all right so the let's say for example the question is you're listening to someone making an order so they want like a TV or delivered to to deliver to somewhere and they first might say oh could you deliver to my house or my home and then they'll say actually I'm at work that day so I'll be in the office and could you actually just leave it in the depot so they've mentioned all three of these and you might hear all three of those and that might cause a lot of confusion because what a lot of people do is they will listen for the first one and the first one they hear they'll just take that one because they know the recording is not going to stop they're under a lot of pressure a lot of stress and then they might hear office or depot later or a synonym of one of those and they're like oh they panic and they lose track so listen to the whole recording and be aware that they might talk about one but that is not necessarily the correct answer problem number two is related to synonyms so many of you will underline key words so let's say for example this is the question and you'll be underlining home and underlining office underlining depot and because you've underlined those or highlighted those you're really really focused on those words and you're listening for those words but in the recording it won't actually state those words it will state a synonym or a paraphrase of that word so it might say could you deliver it to where I live or my house instead of home I'll be at work could you deliver it there instead of office or they might talk about could you deliver it to the the company warehouse instead of the depot so they're not really mentioning these words they can mention these words you should always listen out for them but you should always be aware of synonyms and paraphrases as well and that's the reason why improving your vocabulary will really really help you improve your overall listening score common problems three and four so you might the first common problem when it comes to here imagine you're listening and it's talking about a business and what the type of business is so it could be a manufacturing business an industrial business or an agricultural business the first problem is you might not understand what one of these words mean and many people would panic and be like oh I don't know what agricultural means and then you're going to panic and not really know what to do and you're going to get really really stressed out the other problem is let's say it's definitely not this one but it's maybe manufacturing or industrial and these look they're not the same but they look maybe quite similar to you so with most multiple choice questions not only in the realm of IELTS but most you know proper multiple choice question there will normally be two or three that are very very similar so you have to understand the meaning so that's where vocabulary comes in again the wider your range of vocabulary the better your scores are going to be because you'll be able to differentiate between the two and then when you're listening it might talk about something that's very similar to manufacturing and very similar to industrial and you have to make up your mind and do and and choose the correct answer based on what you hear so those are four common problems and what we also do with our students is this the strategies that we give them help them overcome these common problems so we build in mechanisms and steps that help them avoid these common problems because if you avoid the common problems then you're well on your way to improving your score so now I'm going to give you this step-by-step strategy the first thing I'll say is there's no such thing as a super strategy or a magic strategy like you'll see on youtube and instagram and facebook like power strategy or band nine strategy there's no strategy in the world that can take someone from like a band six to a band nine overnight it's not going to magically improve your listening skills it's not going to magically improve your vocabulary your general english but it just helps you get into the habit of doing the right things and getting the best possible score for you so they're very very very useful and also what they do is we've mentioned habit if you were practicing these strategies what it does is when you practice over and over again using those strategies when you go into the test you know exactly what to do so you I don't like using the word like robotic you're not like a robot but nearly you see what I mean you're just you see the question and you follow a step-by-step system and that kind of frees up your brain to focus on thinking about the correct answer and thinking about the vocabulary and the synonyms on all of those things so they're very very useful but don't think that they are magic they are not magic they are not super they're not going you can't just follow you know a step-by-step strategy and immediately improve your score so let's look at number one number one sounds very boring but this is absolutely crucial read the instructions carefully if you do not read the instructions carefully you're going to lose marks many many many students come to me and they say I've done 20 vocabulary or or listening tests or 200 reading tests and I keep getting the same score and we look at their their mistakes and often it's nothing to do with the fact that their level isn't high enough they're just not reading the instructions carefully if you don't follow the instructions you're not going to get the score that you need number two read and understand the questions so the instructions and the questions are two separate things the instructions will be at the top and it's very very important for example even in the reading test where it'll say you'll do not write more than two words if you write more than two words and or a number all of these different instructions if you don't do those things correctly then you're going to lose the mark but the question is separate so understand the instructions and then understand the questions many of you don't use that time period effectively between you seeing the questions and the recording start you're going to have a little bit of time use that time effectively if you don't understand the questions it's going to be really difficult it like it doesn't matter how good your English is or how good your listening skills are if you don't follow those two simple steps you're going to be in trouble and many of you might think well that's obvious like I'm going to do that anyway most of your behavior is habit you do the same things over and over again whatever your habit is you will mostly do that so using these strategies is guaranteeing that you will check the instructions then look at the question and understand it because you're going to by practicing over and over again get into that habit step number three underline any keywords what are the keywords so it will differ from question to question but the words that you think are important in order for you to get the correct answer so you can underline them circle them whatever you do or you don't have to do that you can just look at them and understand these are the words that I need to be listening out for these are the important words that are going to determine whether I get the correct answer or not number four think of synonyms we've already talked about this you might hear the keyword so keywords are important but you might not hear the keywords you might hear a synonym or even you might hear a paraphrase of the keyword and then do not mark the first thing you hear as we already just discussed it might talk about one might talk about another and then it might take that answer away and give you another answer listen to it all and then decide the correct answer not the whole tape script but that whole part of the recording that deals with that question don't mark the first answer think about it first and then mark the correct answer and pick the correct answer or the answer that you think based on you know take an educated guess if you're not sure but with multiple choice questions always pick an answer if you're unsure you can maybe put an X beside it and maybe you know for example if you're 100% sure put a circle around it and then you can go back and make a decision but with multiple choice even if you you know if a monkey did it and just picked randomly they would get more than if you don't do it at all so please just do check and put the best answer that you can and most importantly move on do not dwell on the answer if you can't think of a correct answer for the multiple choice one just make your best guess and move on and we talked about that in lesson two so again this strategy is not going to guarantee a band nine or anything like that but what it does is it gives you the correct habit the correct system and the key is that you actually apply this strategy a huge number of students email me and say I used your strategy and I got a band six it's like what do you mean use oh well we read it and then we went into the test and we used the strategy it's like no no no no that's not how you you use a strategy you practice you implement it over and over and over again until it becomes habit until it becomes second nature and you don't even have to think about it soon as you see the question it's like bum bum bum bum bum bum follow the system listen for the answer mark the correct answer