Listening

In the listening paper candidates will have to listen to various audios where they will have to demonstrate their ability to understand feeling, attitude, detail, opinion, purpose, agreement, gist, function, topic and specific information.

In total the listening paper will take around forty minutes to complete and consists of four parts as follows:

• Part 1 – Multiple choice
• Part 2 – Sentence completion
• Part 3 – Multiple matching
• Part 4 – Multiple choice

General Preparation for the Listening Paper

Listening to as much English as possible is the obvious preparation that candidates should do before the exam. Candidates should be encouraged to listen to English every day in various forms, for example: news, podcasts, educational videos, dialogues etc.

Candidates should practice listening to a range of different accents, and where suitable read transcripts to help them recognise more easily specific words going forward.

Practicing listening skills by doing sample papers and exam style questions will not only help with overall listening ability, but will also get the candidate used to the type of questions and exercises they can expect int he exam which could be listening to the overall gist of a monologue or recognising specific information.

Candidates should also be aware of the importance of reading the questions thoroughly being the task begins. In the exam they will have time before the start of each exercise to read through the questions. This should be practiced so that they are able to get a feeling of what the audio is about as well as the specific questions that they need to try and find the answers to when the task begins.