The four parts at a glance
The Listening test has four parts and 40 questions, and lasts about 30 minutes. You hear each recording once.
- Part 1: a conversation between two people in an everyday situation, such as booking a course or reporting a lost item. Usually form or note completion.
- Part 2: one speaker in an everyday context, such as a guide describing a site. Often includes a map or plan.
- Part 3: two or three speakers in an educational setting, such as students discussing an assignment with a tutor.
- Part 4: a lecture on an academic topic, usually note completion, with no break in the middle.
In the computer-delivered test you get two minutes at the end to check your answers. In the paper test you get ten minutes to transfer them to the answer sheet. Roughly 30 correct answers out of 40 often gives band 7.
Accents: the real adjustment
On IELTS Learning, our 88 practice sets are recorded with British voices, which is often the hardest adjustment for students from Tamil Nadu. Common surprises:
- The dropped "r" at the ends of words: "car" and "water" sound different from Indian English.
- Weak forms: "for", "to" and "and" become very short, so sentences seem to run together.
- Different vowel sounds in words like "bath", "hot" and "work".
Students in Coimbatore who grew up watching Tamil and Malayalam cinema and mostly Indian news in English will benefit from extra daily exposure to British speech: radio, podcasts or interviews, 15 minutes a day, without subtitles where possible.
Spelling and numbers: free marks you must not lose
Many Listening marks are lost not because a student failed to hear the answer, but because they wrote it wrongly.
- Spelling: names are usually spelt out letter by letter. Practise the alphabet aloud, especially vowels, and the letters G and J, which are easy to mix up.
- Numbers: "fifteen" and "fifty", "thirteen" and "thirty". Listen for the stress: fifTEEN, FIFty.
- Phone numbers and dates: "double five" means 55; "oh" means zero.
- Plurals: if the speaker says "tickets", "ticket" is wrong.
- Word limits: "NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS" means exactly that. Three words is wrong, even if correct in meaning.
- British spelling is safest: "centre", "colour", "programme".
Map and plan questions
Map questions in Part 2 frighten many students, but they follow patterns. Before the audio starts:
- Find the "You are here" point or entrance and turn the map mentally so you face the same way as the speaker.
- Note the labelled places that are already given; answers are usually placed between them.
- Revise direction language: opposite, adjacent to, at the far end, just past, on your left as you enter, in the north-east corner.
Our practice sets include maps and plans so you meet a variety before test day.
Answers come in question order
In IELTS Listening, answers follow the question order. If you are waiting for question 14 and the speaker seems to be talking about question 16, you have probably missed 14 and 15. Do not panic or go back. Move with the recording and guess the missed ones at the end. Our practice sets follow this same order so you learn to keep pace.
Practising with headphones in a Coimbatore home
The test centre will give you headphones for the computer test, so practise that way at home too. Good closed headphones block most of the everyday noise of a Coimbatore street: two-wheeler horns, the vegetable vendor, a neighbour's wet grinder in the morning. Practise at a time when you are alert, not late at night after a long college or factory day.
A sensible routine:
- Weekdays: one practice set, then replay only the parts you got wrong while reading the transcript.
- Twice a week: listening outside IELTS: a lecture or podcast on a subject from your degree.
- Weekends: Listening as part of a full mock test.
- When you consistently reach about 30/40: move to the harder Charged Listening sets.
Common errors checklist
- Writing the first thing you hear when the speaker then corrects it ("Tuesday... no, actually Wednesday").
- Missing the next question while still writing the previous answer.
- Not using the reading time before each part to predict answer types (a number, a name, a place).
- Ignoring the word limit.
Start your IELTS Listening practice from Coimbatore with the free sample sets: create your account or browse the practice tests.