The listening section of the PTE is a minefield. It appears to be simple, but the listening phase is the one that puts your patience to the test. The PTE listening part could be difficult to follow for Indian students who do not speak English as a first language. There is no reason to be concerned anymore. Here are some of our expert tips for improving your PTE Listening score.
Overview of PTE listening section:
The major goal of the PTE listening section is to assess your ability to comprehend English speech and answer questions based on it. The test is 45-57 minutes long and includes eight different sorts of tasks. When the test begins, the candidate must carefully listen to the audio, follow it, and answer the questions.
PTE Listening question types:
- Summarize spoken text
- Multiple Choice questions- Choose multiple answers
- Multiple choice questions – choose single answer
- Fill in the blanks
- Highlight correct summary
- Select the missing word
- Highlight incorrect words
- Write from dictation
7 Ways for a Better Score in The PTE Listening Section:
1. Listen Carefully
The questions like summarize the spoken text in the listening section of the PTE test, the candidates are expected to write a summary of audio played for 60-90 seconds long. The main issue the test takers face here is they lose focus while listening. One thing to keep in mind never loses focus. Thorough practice can increase focus and improve your PTE score.
2. Practice Listening to English
Listening is also an art. And it should be practiced. How? To make it simple, start with watching movies, sitcoms, news, podcasts, etc. As these belong to entertainment it is easy to concentrate and follow. Try getting used to the accent so that it would be less surprising on the test day.
3. Use the mouse pointer
Just like sentence correction questions in the PTE writing section, Highlight incorrect questions are there in the listening section. During these kinds of questions, the script for the audio playing will be presented on the screen and the candidate needs to listen and highlight the word which we spelled wrong or misspelled in the audio. Use the mouse pointer to follow word by word. Losing focus can lead to the loss of important score points.
4. Improve the Vocab
A piece of good knowledge of vocabulary can help you understand the context while the audio is playing. It also helps in other ways like boosting your PTE reading score. One of the other ways to improve vocabulary is by learning a new word daily, reading magazines, books, listening to podcasts, news, etc.
5. Write from Dictation
Scoring in write from dictation questions is very tricky. Because in these kinds of questions, the candidate needs to listen to the sentence or sequence of words, then write down the exact sentence without any mistakes with order or punctuation as well. The best way to master this is, spell out or repeat after the machine what it said. Then it can be easy to remember. Also, make sure to start with Capital letters and end with a full stop.
6. Time management
The time limit is the major problem faced by most of the test takers. Why? Because audio played for 60-90 seconds which can’t be repeated or listen to once again and answer a question from the listened audio, is tricky. Even for native English speakers, the listening test is the toughest part. So the more you practice, the better scores you can gain.
7. Our Expert Tips
While listening to audio in write from dictation, if possible note down the words in a short way or write the first letters of the words so that can help in remembering the order of the spoken text. Also, our experts suggest using the elimination rule to find the best answer. Instead of finding the right answer, try to find the wrong answer and remove it, which leaves the right answer with you.
Along with the above-mentioned tips, it is better to practice with the PTE sample papers. For more guidance, take our intensive PTE Training sessions.
