Listening Study Guide for the TOEFL Test

General Information

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) Listening section assesses your ability to do “academic listening.” The speech you hear will be more casual (not formal) and should sound natural to you. You will have 36 minutes to listen and answer 28 questions.

For this section of the test, you will listen to lectures and conversations wearing headphones, and you will be able to take notes as you listen. The note-taking is really important because in the most recent TOEFL, you only get to listen to each recording once. Then, you will mostly answer typical multiple-choice questions about what you heard. A few questions, however, will have slightly different formats, including:

• questions with more than one correct answer out of over four possible choices
• questions asking you to put steps in a sequence
• questions asking you to place objects or text into the proper place on a chart

Note: We have attempted to provide practice in all these question formats within our system limits. However, be prepared to see slightly different formats for some questions on the actual test.

In this guide we will discuss specific things you should know for the TOEFL Listening section and some ideas for practicing listening skills before test day.

Types of Listening Tasks

During the Listening section of the TOEFL, you will listen to two types of prompts: lectures and conversations. These are styled to sound like lectures you would experience in college classes and conversations you might have while attending college. Before each listening passage, the narrator will introduce the audio. The narrator might say, “Listen to a conversation between a student and the housing manager,” or “Listen to a professor in an Art History class.”

Lectures

Three of the listening prompts will be four-to-five-minute excerpts of longer classroom lectures. The topics covered are from a broad range of subjects, from the arts to life and physical sciences, as well as topics from the social sciences. Don’t worry about being too familiar with these subjects; the passage you listen to will include all the information you need to answer the questions correctly.

Conversations

These will be typical conversations held in an academic situation. You might listen to a student asking a professor for more time on a project or discussing parking permits with an employee.

The conversations are usually short in length (two to four minutes) and will very likely include idioms or expressions. It’s a good idea to brush up on American idioms and expressions, lists of which can be found on the internet.

Types of Questions

On the actual TOEFL, there are six questions about each lecture and five questions about each conversation. Note that our practice questions provide six questions per conversation.

Regardless of whether you’ve listened to a lecture or a conversation, you will need to be able to answer the following types of questions in relation to what you hear.

Gist Content and Gist Purpose

This is a question about the listening passage as a whole. There will be one after each passage and it will always be the first question. As you listen and take notes, you will listen for the gist of the audio passage. The gist is the main idea or main topic of the conversation or lecture. In other words, the gist is the big picture and not the little details.

These questions require that you listen for what the topic is about. The lecturer or speaker will usually give you a clue in the beginning of the passage. For example, the lecturer might say, “Good morning class. Let’s continue our talk about the geographical features of the Great Lakes.” You will know right away that the gist of the passage is the geographical features of the Great Lakes.

Therefore, when you see a question that asks what the topic is mainly about, you should immediately identify that it is a gist or main idea question. You can recognize a gist question by looking for clues in the question. The question will often be worded in general terms. For example:

• “What are the students talking about?”
• “Why is the professor reviewing the chapter?”

A gist question will often include words like mainly, mostly, or about. These words are clear indicators of a question seeking the main idea. The answers may be directly stated by the speaker, or they may require inference on your part.

Details

Detail questions will always deal with major points in the listening passage. The speaker will often use transition words to indicate that a major point is about to be spoken, so you should take notes then. You’ll often hear list words such as first, second, and third, or the lecturer may even state the major point outright. For example:

“Our first major point about Navajo architecture is that it was designed to…”

You’ll also hear words like additionally, furthermore, lastly, and finally. These are clear clues that you are about to hear a major point. Prepare yourself to write notes here, as details will follow that will help you answer detailed questions.

Details are often referred to as “supporting details” because they support the main idea. There may even be a person who restates the information incorrectly so the speaker can reiterate the information, or a second person in the passage may repeat the information. This is done for your benefit, to let you know that it was an important detail. Write this information down because it will most likely answer a question after you finish the passage.

Function

The speaker’s function or purpose is not what the speaker says, necessarily, but what is implied by what is said. While listening, you must determine if the speaker is complaining, agreeing, narrating, questioning, recommending, or something else. Understanding the meaning within the context of an entire lecture or conversation is significant in cases where the speaker’s opinion or perspective is involved.

When taking notes on a lecture or conversation, pay close attention to whether the statement is intended to be understood literally or has another meaning beneath the surface expression. These questions cover what you understand about what you hear. How does the speaker say it? Are they using terms and expressions that say one thing but mean another? It’s not so much what the speaker says directly but what their purpose is or what they mean.

Attitude

The speaker’s attitude is used to communicate information that is not directly said. You will need to use implied information to decide what the speaker’s thoughts, feelings, or opinions are at some point in the excerpt. The information you need may not be linguistic (direct words or phrases), but in the speaker’s tone of voice.

Determining Attitude

The speaker’s attitude can be determined by volume, pitch, and speed. To really get the point of the excerpt, you’ll often have to pick up on clues in the speaker’s tone and attitude. Is the speaker using a calm or emotional tone? Is the speaker using casual, formal, or professional language? Is the speaker’s voice loud, hard, and firm, or is it slow, soft, and nervous? Does the speaker’s voice sound friendly or unfriendly? Confident or angry? These rises and falls in tone, speed, and volume can give a clear indication of the speaker’s attitude.

Questions that address the speaker’s attitude will have key words or phrases like seem to feel or best expresses. When you see question clues like these, you will be required to answer based on your pragmatic understanding; in other words, what you understand by the speaker’s tone, volume, speed, and pitch.

Reasons for Statements

Questions of this type usually begin with why. The question may also include a direct reference to a speaker in the lecture or conversation. One example would be, “Why does the professor say, ‘You’re better than you think’?” or “Why does the housing director listen to Matt’s complaint?”

Degree of Certainty

A question may ask you to estimate the speaker’s degree of certainty. You can determine this in several ways: *

• If a speaker thinks they are saying something important, they will probably say it more firmly, thereby emphasizing the point.

• When a speaker has a very strong opinion, their volume will often increase. A louder sentence stands out, indicating a degree of certainty and importance. This is true whether the emotion is positive or negative. People use a higher volume or stronger emotional voice when they are excited, angry, annoyed, or being sarcastic. When people are sure of something, they tend to speak louder. However, when people are not confident, they tend to speak more quietly.

• Speed also plays an important role in the degree of certainty. English speakers tend to talk faster when they are excited about something. Volume, speed, and strong emotion can determine the certainty (or uncertainty) of the speaker.

• Lastly, the speaker’s word choice can also determine their certainty. When they are less certain, they may use words like a little, kind of, sort of, more or less, maybe, not so much or other words of this kind. These words are called qualifiers. If a speaker uses a lot of qualifiers, then it is very possible that the speaker does not have a high degree of certainty. If the speaker doesn’t use qualifiers, then they most likely have a higher degree of certainty.

Organization

There will be a number of questions that will measure your understanding of how the speaker organized the information. To successfully answer this type of question, it is vital to take notes as you listen. Find a system that works for you and practice it before taking the test. A question regarding the organization is usually worded in this fashion:

“How is the information in the listening passage organized?”

Or a question might refer to a particular section of the passage. For example:

“What is the professor trying to demonstrate by describing the magic trick?”

There are different techniques you can use to help you pinpoint important details in your notes. For instance, you can mark topic changes with a star or brackets. Try circling introductions and conclusions, and use symbols like + and – to represent “for” and “against” or “positive” and “negative.” Mind mapping is also a good way of taking notes quickly (see illustration below).

Also, listen for transition words. Words like first, second, and third will guide you through the speaker’s ideas.

Connecting Content

The questions that involve connecting and synthesizing information require that you understand the passage as a whole. Synthesizing information is taking interrelated information from the entire passage and determining the importance of the sections, defining the relationships between ideas, drawing conclusions, and making inferences from the information you heard. Simply put, you’ll need to have a handle on more than just the main idea. You’ll have to understand how the speaker presents their ideas, decide which are important, and understand how the ideas are connected.

After you identify what is important in the text, you must go through the process of organizing, recalling, and recreating the information and fitting it in with what is already known.

The questions you answer in this category measure your ability to integrate information from different parts of the listening passage. The relationships you hear in the conversation or lecture may be explicit or implicit. To choose the right answer, you have to identify and account for the relationships among the ideas and the details you hear.

During the question portion of the listening passage, you may be asked to put information together in a table, fill in a chart, or put events in order. This is where your ability to make connections and organize information is critical. The question may ask you to categorize certain information. When you recognize different pieces of the conversation or lecture that connect, jot it down in your notes so those connections will be clear when you’re answering questions. These questions will have you using information from more than one place in the listening passage.

For instance, suppose in a listening passage the lecturer introduces a discussion of the working conditions for teachers in the 1800s. If your notes are thorough, you may be able to determine that the lecturer started out discussing working conditions, but the passage actually goes into detail about the rules and policies for female teachers in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Through your notes, you will have identified a recurring idea of rules (not so much conditions) and will be able to categorize the information in a table or chart. As you are taking notes and organizing the relationships and important information, your note-taking system can identify logical relationships between the speaker’s ideas. For example, you could show cause and effect with arrows, numbered steps in a sequence, or comparisons with a quick chart. Here again, mind mapping is a useful visual tool to reveal the organization of content.

Inference

Making inferences and drawing conclusions is listening to what is stated and determining relevant information from unstated information. You will see questions that have key words such as imply or infer, or the question may have the format, “What does the ____ mean?” When you see these key words in a question, you’ll know that you need to understand something beyond what was explicitly stated. Let’s look at an example:

Library Worker (man): Welcome to the university library. You look a little lost.
Woman: I think so. I have a paper about Mount Everest due on Monday. I’m not sure where to look for information.
Library Worker (man): No problem. That’s what I’m here for.

You should conclude that the woman is a student and the man works for the university’s library. The woman is most likely looking for resources about Mount Everest at the library. The library worker responds positively.

An example of a question that asks you to infer or draw a conclusion about this passage might look like this:

What does the man imply when he says: “No problem. That’s what I’m here for”?

The answer choices might look like this:

• The man is going to help her visit Mount Everest.
• The man is going to help her find the information she needs.
• The woman wants to go to Mount Everest.
• The man is here to reserve a book at the library.

The correct answer is that the man in this audio will help the woman find the information she needs.

Other questions of this type could look like these:

• “What does the professor imply when he says ____?”

• “What can be inferred from the professor’s reaction to the student?”

• “What is the purpose of the woman’s response?”