Aim for English
Listening in TOEFL
TOEFL iBT at a glance
Back to the TOEFL resource homepage
--
- TOEFL iBT overview and general tips
- The language you'll need in TOEFL
- Independent tasks in TOEFL iBT
- Integrated tasks in TOEFL iBT
- The importance of taking notes
- Understanding inferences in TOEFL
- Understanding stated details
- Understanding main ideas
- Summarising
- Know your own English
- Skills you'll need in iBT
- Writing in TOEFL
- Speaking in TOEFL
- Listening in TOEFL
- Reading in TOEFL
TOEFL iBT tip of the month
TOEFL assesses your ability to communicate in an academic environment. There are similarities in reading, listening, speaking and writing questions. While your English has to be very good, the test won’t be impossible if you learn a few skills and do as much practice as possible.
More TOEFL links
Listening in TOEFL
What’s important?
-
Take notes the whole time you’re listening.
-
Think about how information is organised.
-
Think about people’s feelings and attitudes as they speak.
Listening in TOEFL
You’ll get at least six, and up to nine, passages in the TOEFL listening section. These are fairly evenly split between campus conversations and academic lectures. Actually, in the academic passages you’ll also hear class discussions, but you should treat them the same as the lectures.
TOEFL wants to give you a lot to listen to but only a few questions to answer. That’s because they want you to take good notes, as you would at university sitting a lecture theatre with hundreds of students.
Each topic is organised in several ways. This helps you to organise your notes, and predict what they questions will be. It’s not a memory test, as there’s too much to remember. You’ll also get summarising questions in listening, so the only way to answer them with so many details is to refer back to your notes.
You should also be aware that any time there’s a consultation between a student and a member of university staff, they always agree to do something after the conversation. You can be sure that you’ll need your notes for that question.