Listening

About 29 minutes, about 47 items. Four kinds of task: Listen and Choose a Response, Listen to a Conversation, Listen to an Announcement and Listen to an Academic Talk.

• Every recording is played once. There is no second chance, and there is no pause button.
• You may take notes 笔记 while you listen, on the paper the test centre gives you.
• The section is adaptive, so what you hear depends on how the earlier items went.

⚠ The single biggest cause of lost marks here is dwelling 纠结: a student misses one detail, keeps thinking about it, and misses the next thirty seconds as well. One missed item is one mark. Thirty seconds of not listening is five. Let it go and stay with the speaker.

You hear one short turn of speech and choose what would naturally come next.

• This is a test of everyday conversation, not of academic English. The right answer is the reply a real person would give.
• Listen to the function 功能 of what was said, not only the words: was it a request, an offer, a complaint, an apology, a suggestion? The reply has to match the function.
• Intonation 语调 carries meaning here. "You're coming to the meeting?" with a rising tune is a question; the same words falling are a statement.
• ⚠ An answer that repeats words from the prompt is usually wrong. Natural replies use different words.

• A conversation is two speakers, often a student and someone at a university — a tutor, a librarian, an office. Track who wants what: one speaker has a problem and the other offers a solution, and most questions sit on that line.
• An announcement is one speaker giving practical information: a change of room, a deadline, a procedure. Listen for what has changed and what the listener must do.
• In both, a change of direction is signalled before it happens. Actually, but, the thing is, having said that, on second thoughts — a signpost 路标词 tells you the next sentence matters.
• Numbers, dates, room names and prices are exactly the details these tasks ask about. Write them down as you hear them; do not trust your memory for a number.

A lecture-style talk on a study topic, with one main speaker.

• Do not try to write everything. Write the shape: the topic, then each new point on its own line, with a dash for the example that supports it. Your notes should look like the talk's outline, not like its transcript 文字稿.
• Lecturers signal structure: today I want to look at, there are three reasons, the first of these, which brings me to, so to summarise. Those phrases are the outline, spoken aloud.
• Listen for the lecturer's attitude 态度 as well as the facts. Surprisingly, of course, it is often claimed and a change of tone all tell you what the speaker thinks — and some questions ask exactly that.
• An example is there to support a point. If you catch the example but not the point, you have the less useful half; ask yourself "what is this an example of?"

• Listen once, like the test. Practising with replays trains a skill the test does not measure. Play a recording once and answer; only then replay it to see what you missed.
• Shadowing 跟读 — playing a sentence and saying it back immediately — is the fastest way to improve both listening and pronunciation, because it forces you to hear the whole sentence, not the words you already know.
• Accents: the test uses speakers from North America and elsewhere. Listen to a range on purpose, not only to the one you find easiest.
• Fifteen focused minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday. Listening is a habit of attention, and attention is trained by frequency.

• Practise taking notes with your hand while your ears keep working. Most students can do either but not both, and that is a skill you build in about two weeks.
• Use abbreviations you already know: arrows for cause and result, + and -, initials for long names. Inventing a system on test day costs you the first recording.
• If you miss an answer, mark the item, choose the best guess now, and move on. There is no penalty 扣分 for a wrong answer and a blank scores the same as a wrong one.
• ⚠ Watch the everyday tasks. Chinese candidates often score well on the academic talk and lose marks on the short conversation, because school listening practice is almost entirely academic.
• Format facts in this section were checked on the ETS website on 13 September 2026: TOEFL iBT content and structure.