What Is the TOEFL Listening Section Like ?

The Listening section measures your ability to understand conversations and lectures in English from native English speaking accents of North America, U.K., New Zealand or Australia. This shall reflect the variety of native English accents you may encounter while studying abroad.

TOEFL Listening section pattern

The listening section may have recordings of lectures or recordings of conversations.
Each bit of audio can be from three to five minutes long, followed by five to six questions.

Understanding the listening section

Lectures can feature either a single speaker or a classroom discussion (interaction between the instructor and students).
Lecture topics are taken from a variety of academic subjects in the arts and sciences, such as architecture, music, biochemistry, computer science, and anthropology.

Conversations are either based on office hours or service encounters with university staff.
Conversations deals with topics like course registration, graduation requirements, and financial aid. It helps to become familiar with the language and structure of university administration.

The lecture/conversation audios can be listened only once. There is an exception, some questions may play back a part of the recording for you to listen to again.

Type of questions/tasks the listening section has

The questions associated with the lectures/conversations, typically ask about the main idea and supporting details. Some questions ask about a speaker's purpose or attitude.

According to ETS, these questions can be categorized into 3 types -

Basic comprehension questions

This category includes 3 types of questions -

Gist-content questions - Concerns the broad content of the lecture.
Gist-purpose questions - The primary reasons for lectures or conversations as opposed to the main content.
Detail questions - To reproduce factual information from conversations or lectures.

Pragmatic Understanding Questions :

This category of includes 2 Types of exercises -

Understanding the function of what is said questions - Evaluates test-taker competence in terms of understanding the speaker's motive for including specific statements.

Understanding the speaker's attitude questions - The speaker's preferences or feelings. A few of these questions require students to be able to detect irony, disapproval, or sarcasm through tone of
voice or intonation.

Connecting Information Questions

This category includes 3 types of questions -

Understanding organization questions - Students must be able to choose answer options that accurately reflect the structure of a listening exercise or the purpose of individual statements.

Connecting content questions - Concerns the explicit or implicit relationships between ideas. This question type is often associated with charts or tables, and is only in lecture-based exercises.

Making inferences questions - Asks test-takers to draw conclusions from the statements presented.

Tips to crack the listening section

Hearing something only once is the major difficulty with the listening section.
This is why you need to take good notes and make educated guesses about what questions you could get.
This means a good memory and good notes are the key.

Seek out for English-language movies, TV shows and YouTube videos (these are particularly helpful with understanding accents).
Listen to recordings of lectures and practice taking notes during them. Be sure to expose yourself to many different kinds of English.

Practice note-taking for listening section here !