Getting a band 8 in listening becomes challenging for many students. They get stuck with band 7.5 and just a couple of questions away from CLB9 and a favourable score for visa processing.
Here are some sure shot tricks that never fail.
1. Be extra careful to avoid spelling and grammatical errors.
Many homophones are extremely confusing. Even if you know the word but make a spelling error like mail/male, sail/sale, you lose the points. Students tend to panic and quickly fill up the blank without ensuring the sentence is grammatically correct!
2. Make your notes while listening
You may find it hard to concentrate on the lecture listening to any kind of lecture or talk, and making notes at the same time so it is important that you practise jotting down keywords in your practice sessions to enhance your comprehension.
3. Get familiar with the questions : Prediction works wonders
During the test, when you get some time to read the questions, read them and underline some important keywords in the questions. When you hear those keywords, you will know that you can expect to hear the answers next. It helps you quickly spot your answers especially, when you know you are listening for a date, or a time, or a dish on the menu and so on.
4. Don’t get stuck if you miss an answer
When you predicted what kind of answer you are listening for, you can easily figure out when the topic of conversation switches to another subject and it is then when you realise that you missed that answer. At that juncture, you can not let yourself loose your morale and regret, you have to quickly move on the next question, predict the answer type and start listening for it, to avoid a chain reaction causing you to lose multiple answers. Worst thing that you can do is to miss all questions after the ONE THAT YOU MISSED. Most sensible thing is to be extra cautious and getting all rest of the questions correct.
6. Practise listening to different speakers and accents
IELTS Listening test recordings include speakers from different countries with different accents: they use British, Canadian, American, Australian, New Zealand speakers, etc. You should practise listening to different diction to get familiar with various speaking styles. It is important to listen to varied topics so that you do not lose interest in the audio only because you are unaware of the subject or you find it extremely boring or difficult.