How Do I Get a Band 9 in IELTS Listening?

So today I am going to answer a very common question we get at IELTS Advantage: How do I get a

band

8 or around 9 in the IELTS

listening

test? And the problem is really the fact that the

listening

test is divided into four parts. The first part is the easiest part and then it gets harder and harder, with the third and fourth parts being the most difficult, especially the fourth, so most students who struggle to get a

band

-aid or a band nine They have no problem with the first part. They find the second part pretty easy, but once they start getting into the third and fourth part they run into some very common problems and then what they try and do is try to solve it the wrong way, so there are two ways that The students try to figure this out. problem and if you are doing these two things you are never going to solve this problem of trying to get one band-aid or a band-aid nine, so the first common problem is that they will depend on strategies.

Now the strategies work, they help you, but. Unless you have three other things that are much more important than strategies, strategies will be useless, so strategies are useful, but they are one piece of the puzzle, the biggest mistake we see students make is taking too many tests. of listening comprehension, so often students will come to us. and I say I've done all the listening tests I could find but I still can't get a band aid or band 9. Strategies and especially listening tests won't help you get through band seven, they won't help you solve part three and part four the three things that will really help you for parts three and four are listening skills number one, vocabulary number two and focus number three, especially the ability to focus on multiple speakers speaking at the same time, so let's take a sentence from a listening comprehension test and we break it down to show you that these two things are useless until you address these three things and then at the end we will give you a technique that we teach our students that helps them improve their listening skills, your vocabulary and concentrate on listening everything at the same time and you will enjoy yourself while you do it.

It's not often that you enjoy something while studying IELTS, so let's say that in the listening test we heard this phrase: do you want to go to the jazz festival, so unfortunately, especially in parts three and four, the speaker will not talk as clearly and slowly as I am speaking now. I don't talk to my friends and family in this slow, well-spoken way if I had to ask this. ask one of my friends, I wouldn't say: do you want to go to the jazz festival? It would sound more like do you want to go to the jazz festival?

That's something that's very difficult for people in part three and in part four, no. that the person speaks fast but speaks naturally the way I am speaking to you now is not my natural voice. I'm talking to you now because I know you're an English learner and I'm trying to speak like Clearly and as slowly as possible, so what the person is actually saying in parts three and four when they say this sentence sounds more like this, yeah, and this connects, I want to connect, go, go to the jazz festival, so there are some problems here. for most people who are trying to get a band aid or a bad nine, they're not used to connected speech so here we have connected speech here we have connected speech and here we have connected speech and these schwa sounds reduced sounds because this is how most native english speakers talk to each other and they are testing your ability to understand real english so one of the skills is to understand this connected speech and without this skill it doesn't matter how many listening practice tests Whatever you do, it doesn't matter No matter how good your strategies are, if you don't understand, do you want to go?

You will never be able to answer this question. Also, if we take a look at two key parts of this sentence, do you understand what jazz is? A lot of students trying to get a band aid or a band 9 I have no idea what jazz is too do you really know what a festival is and then when we put them together do you really understand what a jazz festival is? there is no way you can To answer this question, if this is the key part of listening, if you don't understand what jazz and festival means and you can't understand connected speech, that's why listening and vocabulary are so important.

Additionally, you must be able to concentrate for a long time. Time periods Think about the last time you really focused on listening to something in English and think about how long it lasted; It's probably only a minute or two for most students, also think about the fact that you're not just listening, you're reading you're thinking you're writing all at once unless you can concentrate for a long period of time. listening, thinking and writing in English, you will not be able to answer the questions in parts 3 and 4 correctly but don't worry, we will show you a really easy technique that you can use that will help you improve these three things, so let's say this is person one and then person two says no, I have to study for my finals, so what does this really mean?

You may have never heard of this word in this context, so you also have to guess what this word actually means from the context. No, I have to study for my final exams, so you may not know what final exams mean, but from the context of the conversation, you might be able to guess that this means exams or a test, your test. final, normally a university student, their final test, their final exam, they will call them final exams, so you will never be able to understand 100% of the vocabulary, but I need to get used to guessing the meaning of some words in context while listening at the same time and you think at the same time and write your answer and decide your answer at the same time.

That sounds very, very difficult, but it's not necessary. It may be difficult, but before I show you this technique called microlistening, don't look up some strategies, take a lot of practice tests and then waste days and weeks and you're still short of a band-aid or a bad nine, use this instead. So what is microlistening? Let me show you exactly what it is. The first thing we are going to do is choose something that you like to listen to and the key word is that you enjoy it, why, because you are You will have to do this technique every day or three, four, five times a week for weeks and months.

If you came here looking for a quick tip that will guarantee you'll get a bad nine, you're looking wrong. video we don't teach you those things because those things just don't work no one teaches you quick tips to get a band 9 and listen never was a real

ielts

teacher they are a youtuber pretending to be an

ielts

teacher so once you choose something we like so this could be a podcast or it could be a YouTube video but not learning English on YouTube so there's no one trying to teach you English on YouTube because that's not real English and most of the learning of English on YouTube is going to make your English worse, not better choose something real like two people talking to each other who are native English speakers or a television program or, for example, a news program that interests you or it could be a movie, Whatever you're interested in, just make sure they're real native English speakers or very high-level English learners who speak naturally.

I would highly recommend podcasts because a they are free and b there is not a single topic in the world right now where there aren't hundreds if not thousands of really great podcasts so pick the topic you like, would love to cook cricket, read , business leadership, whatever you like, pick something to listen to and this is where micro listening comes in, so you'll listen until you don't. you understand, then you don't understand, imagine that we are listening and we hear this. Do you want to go to the jazz festival? You may not understand that because of the connected speech.

Do you want to go? Then you would stop and then you would stop the podcast. YouTube channel, the movie, whatever it is, just stop and then you'll listen again until you can write the sentence. Don't worry if you can't understand the sentence completely, just listen again a few times, so listen again. Pause. Came back. Listen again. You're only listening to one or two sentences, which is why it's called micro-listening until you feel comfortable enough to try writing the sentence. So, for example, let's say you're listening to me interviewing another IELTS teacher and, um, do you listen?

Okay, if I tell you about click bait, you might find some of the difficulties of connected speech here, so it sounds like a z. Is it okay if I'm connecting together, I talk to you so that the sound is reduced here about click bait? What is clickbait? I don't understand this, so you are listening until there is some speech connected or maybe the person is speaking too fast for you or there is some vocabulary that you don't fully understand, so we are focusing on our listening skills, our vocabulary and we are improving our focus, all at the same time while listening to something we are really enjoying, so listen as many times as it takes to fully understand the sentence, don't worry if it takes you five six seven eight nine ten times, but if you do that, it will What will happen is that all this connected speech will start to make sense in your brain and you will start to get used to how real native English speakers actually speak, you don't have to.

Worry about practicing your pronunciation at this stage, you can if you want, but most of the students we work with who have this problem don't really have a pronunciation problem, they have more of a connected speech understanding than a problem pronouncing this and then what we are going to do is if there is a new word or new phrase, don't look for the meaning, guess the meaning from the context, so what does the context mean? means the words around this word means the sentences around this word you might think about the title of the podcast or what the general topic is that they're talking about, so maybe it's interviewing another teacher about why they keep putting titles of clickbait that trick students into their videos to get views instead of teaching students.

Being able to guess the meaning of this word clickbait is when you focus on tricking the viewer into clicking on your video, which shows that you are more concerned about growing your YouTube channel than helping your viewers improve, from this context. you can guess what this means remember that you will hear words that you probably won't be familiar with when you are watching part three and part four when you are listening to part three and part four there will always be some words that you don't know I completely understand that you need to develop this as a skill.

One of the skills we teach is guessing meaning from context. This will not only help you guess the meaning from the context. If a new word emerges, you are improving the range of your vocabulary. you are reducing the number of words you don't know, so again you are having fun, you are improving your listening skills, you are improving your ability to guess meaning from context and you are improving your vocabulary, that will not only help you on the test listening test will also help you on the reading test, the writing test, and the speaking test all at the same time, so it requires a little more work than just going on youtube and searching for, you know, top 10 tips to get a band 9 but this is much more effective finally add new vocabulary to a vocabulary notebook it can be a paper notebook it can be a digital notebook but don't lose this new vocabulary if you lose it if you don't use it you will lose it and then, finally, review the new vocabulary.

You can review it by using it in example sentences, for example, and there are many, many things you can do to review the vocabulary. Maybe I'll do a video soon on how to review new vocabulary and then what you do. once you've listened, microlisten on a sentence or two, then move on, start again, keep listening to that podcast, that movie, or that TV show until you find something you don't understand again, pause it, start the whole process again . What you can also do is most podcasts, YouTube channels and TV shows have subtitles, but turn them off while you do this and turn them on just to check that you are correct because often you will hear a sentence and there will be a few words that you really don't understand at all, try to understand them first and then turn on the subtitles at the end and check them, but be careful on youtube and sometimes the subtitles are not accurate most of the time, but sometimes they are.

They are not, if you want more help with listening you can visit our website ieltsadvantage.com.I have many articles, free resources for listening or if you click below you will find a fundamentals course that covers writing, speaking, reading and listening and has a great video on listening to help you understand the fundamentals of how to improve your score. listen in IELTS. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and the key really is to do it if you just watch this lesson and don't do any of this, you're not. you're going to improve somehow don't waste time on things that don't work, especially doing many, many, many listening tests do things that actually work abroad