The key point is this: make sure to install a good audio player on your computer, phone, tablet, or wherever you plan to do your listening practice. Take the time to learn how it works. Keep notes of interesting vocabulary that you learn. Do lots of listen-and-repeat practice of sounds, words, and phrases that you find difficult.

Welcome to Magoosh’s complete guide to TOEFL Listening. Here you’ll get an overview of the listening section of the TOEFL iBT, a look at the different types of questions, and a TOEFL Listening practice test. In addition to that mock test, you’ll get additional practice and tips for Listening on the TOEFL test.

Each week students should submit a progress report to ensure they are on track. Inform students that they can upload their videos into your Canvas course using My Media; Create a video assignment in your Canvas course to make. Instruct students to submit their video assignments to make grading fast and easy using the Canvas speed grader tool. Choose a reading passage and audio recording of the reading that is slightly above students' independent reading levels. Ask students to listen to the audio while following along on the paper copy of the passage. Have students read out loud along out loud with the audio recording. Ask students to read the passage without the audio.

Structure of the TOEFL Listening Section

The Relationship Between TOEFL Listening Lectures, Conversations, and Questions

The Listening section is made up of three to four academic lectures (each accompanied by six questions) and two or three conversations that focus on university life in the United States (each accompanied by five questions). Depending on whether you have an experimental section with some additional unscored experimental questions, the entire section will last either 41 or 57 minutes. Below are the overall stats for the TOEFL Listening audio tracks and question sets.

(NOTE: The timer runs only while you are answering questions and stops when audio is playing; this is why the timer gives only 35 seconds per question.)

Type of audio	Tracks and questions	Timing
Lecture	3-4 tracks 6 Qs per track	35 sec. per question
Conversation	2-3 tracks 5 Qs per track	35 sec. per question
Both types (standard section)	5 tracks 28 questions	41 min. total
Both types (experimental section)	7 tracks 39 questions	57 min. total

You will not know the questions while you listen, and you will not be able to listen again to the full recording to check your answer choice. That means a good memory and good notes are key to giving the correct answer. (This is just as important as your listening skills!) You cannot change your answers after they are submitted—your only choice is to answer questions and go forward to the next questions. Sometimes, questions will deal with particular parts of the audio recordings, and the test will replay a small audio clip for you. This is only for certain questions however, usually 0-2 per recording. After a set of five or six questions is finished, the next recording will start automatically.

Subject Matter and Tone: TOEFL Listening vs. TOEFL Reading

The lectures in TOEFL Listening can come from any academic discipline that can show up on the Reading section—in short, almost anything a freshman could take a class in, except math or mathematical sciences. The conversations are either conversations between a student and a professor during office hours, or conversations between a student and some member of support staff/university administration. Often the second kind of conversation deals with topics like course registration, graduation requirements, and financial aid. It helps to become familiar with the language and structure of university administration so you don’t get stuck on a Listening passage that takes place in a setting you’re unfamiliar with, such as, say, a registrar’s office.

Whereas the Reading section features very sterile, academic language, the Listening section is designed to mimic natural speech. This means that the speakers will pause, change sentences or topics abruptly, and occasionally say something incorrect or forget what they were talking about. You may be asked questions about these imperfections, so a familiarity with unrehearsed speech is essential to doing well in the Listening section. Unlike in the Official Guide, no part of the real Listening test will ever be transcribed for you. It’s important to do plenty of Listening practice questions (like the ones found here) without looking at the transcripts!

Many of the question types on the Listening section will look familiar to test takers who have seen the Reading section, but a few will deal with the unique ability of speech to convey information without words—through intonation and stress, for example. In a separate post, we take a more in-depth look at the type of questions that you’ll encounter on the Listening section.

The Listening section will expose you to a variety of content both academic and non-academic. Even before the recording starts, your test will give you some idea of what kind of recording you’ll be listening to, which can help you to know what kinds of questions to expect.

Although all Listening excerpts are noticeably slower than natural speech, the speakers try to speak as naturally as possible. This means that they use all the “ums,” pauses, and sudden redirects that you would encounter in actual language. Not only do you need to be able to navigate these incidental cues, but you also need to be ready to comment on how they function in context, as you will probably have to answer at least one question on your test about the meaning of a byte of incidental language. Needless to say, pacing is key.

Types of TOEFL Listening Audio Clips

As I mentioned above, there are two basic types of TOEFL Listening audio tracks: lectures and conversations. Below, we’ll look at those track types in greater detail, with links to examples of each kind of track. (The examples are all taken from Magoosh’s TOEFL prep service.)

Lectures

The first, and in many ways most grueling, type of Listening assignment is the lecture. Lectures generally last about five minutes, and can be on a wide variety of topics including natural sciences, history, art, anthropology, and business/economics. Each lecture will begin with a sentence like this example: “Listen to the following excerpt from a lecture in an introductory economics class.”

There are two basic types of lecture: with students’ questions and without students’ questions. When there are questions, it may be just one quick interruption or it could be a back-and-forth between the professor and multiple students, in a format similar to a conversation. In either case, the content is the same: all lectures focus entirely on an academic topic and are set in a classroom.

Every lecture is accompanied by six questions, and they may be of any type. You will usually only see organization questions in lectures, so pay extra attention to the organization of any lecture you’re given. (Organization questions focus on the way spoken information is organized, as you’ll learn in this post’s section on TOEFL Listening question types.)

Conversations

The conversation samples are shorter than the lectures, and they may contain academic or non-academic content. They generally take place either between a student and a professor or between a student and someone in a support role at a university. Conversations with a professor may include topics like assignment deadlines (non-academic content), clarification of course material (academic content), or upcoming assignments/projects (can be academic or non-academic content). Conversations with people in support roles include topics like registration, housing, and other logistical aspects of college life. Some familiarity with the language and culture of American higher education will be helpful in understanding the conversations.

Conversations usually last between three and five minutes, and are accompanied by five questions. Conversations are less likely than lectures to have organization or detail questions, but you should expect more questions about attitude and function.

Sample TOEFL Listening Audio Tracks

Question Types for TOEFL Listening

There are 7 general question types in TOEFL Listening:

• Detail (understanding specific pieces of factual information)
• Main Idea (identifying the primary purpose of a conversation or lecture)
• Inference (recognizing implied information)
• Organization (recognizing the relationship between different pieces of information; almost exclusively used for lectures)
• Attitude (inferring the speaker’s attitude or opinion)
• Function (understanding the reason a specific thing is said)
• Categorizing (organizing ideas from the audio into categories based on their similarities and differences)

Each of these types deserves careful attention. It’s important to be aware of how every question type works. As you practice for TOEFL Listening, you should also become aware of which question types you fee lmost confident in, and which quesiton types you need to improve in. This will help you build on your strengths in TOEFL Listening, while also addressing your weaknesses.

In fact, TOEFL Listening question types are so important that Magoosh has dedicated an entire post to them:

Of course, one of the most important aspects of acing these question types is to follow winning tips and tricks in your TOEFL Listening prep. Below, we’ll look at tips for preparing for this section.

Six TOEFL Listening Tips and Tricks

Magoosh’s instructors have a lot of advice to share on TOEFL Listening. That’s why we’ve devoted a whole post to TOEFL Listening tips and tricks. You can go to that article for a really in-depth look at the best ways to ace the TOEFL Listening section. But here in this post, I can also give you some “quick hit” tips. Below is a short list of the top tips and tricks for success on this part of the TOEFL.

Tip # 1: Become great at note-taking.

“Easier said than done,” you might say as you look at this tip. Fair enough. Let me help you follow this tip by telling you how to become great at note-taking. First and foremost, focus only on the most important information in TOEFL Listening: the main topic, and the main point or points the speakers make. If you take notes in too much detail, you’ll be so busy writing stuff down that you won’t have time to really think about what it all means. Secondly, try to find some actual examples of good TOEFL note-taking. It helps to see what good notes look like before you start taking your own. Magoosh has a resource for sample Listening notes that you may want to check out. You can also take a look at this bonus video: Lucas’s three tips on taking good notes in TOEFL Listening.)

Tip # 2: Don’t get too distracted by numbers that you hear.

Number words are strange. They’re often the first thing you learn in your own langage, but in a second language, they can be surprisingly hard to remember. This is especially true in English. English deals with numbers in a way that can seem a little odd in comparison to most other languages. Now, here’s the good news: exact numbers are rarely tested in TOEFL Listening answer choices. Read this article on TOEFL Listening and numbers for more details on how often you can ignore numbers, and when you should pay just a little bit of attention to them.

Tip # 3: If you don’t fully hear something, move on; it’s gone!

You probably won’t listen perfectly 100% of the time in TOEFL Listening, but that’s OK! If your mind wanders, or if you simply can’t fully recognize what was just said, don’t feel bad, and don’t let it distract you. Instead, move forward and focus on whatver gets said next. Often, clues from the rest of the clip will help you understand the overall meaning of the audio clip, so that you’ll still be able to answer the questions that follow.

Tip # 4: When you’re dealing with unfamiliar words, look for context clues.

Whether you simply didn’t hear something (as discussed in Tip 3), or you heard but didn’t understand, you can look for context clues: other keywords you hear, the tone of voice of the speakers, the context of the topic or situation, etc…. Again, don’t get distracted by the things you don’t understand; instead, focus on what you do understand. For a tutorial on using context in TOEFL Listening, see the post “What to Do When You Don’t Understand a Word.”

Tip # 5: TOEFL Listening lectures are similar to essays or reading passages.

Sometimes spoken English can be surprisingly similar to written English. This is esepcially true for academic lectures: so often, such lectures are structured like spoken versions of educational passages or factual essays. Learn to recognize and anticipate this structure, and following a TOEFL Listening lecture becomes easy. For more details, see the article “How to ‘Read’ a TOEFL Lecture.”

Tip # 6: Practice with high quality TOEFL Listening materials.

So many TOEFL Listening practice sets out there just aren’t that high quality. This is esepcially true of free ones. The good news is that there are some TOEFL prep materials out there that closely match what you’ll see on test day. And best of all, a number of these resources are free. The best free TOEFL Listening prep comes from the official TOEFL preparation web page from ETS. But if I do say so, Magoosh TOEFL offers the second best prep after the official materials. Our team studies the official materials very carefully so that we can create the best possible TOEFL Listening practice for you, both on this blog and in the question bank for our TOEFL prep service.

And that tip leads perfectly into the next section of this article. Below, you can take a full-length Magoosh TOEFL Listening practice test. And after that, I’ll give you a list of other free and affordable high-quality practice resources from Magoosh and ETS.

Magoosh’s Free Full-Length TOEFL Listening Test

Below, you can play the video to go through a free full-length TOEFL Listening test. Actually, it’s a more than full-length practice test for Listening. Because this mock test was created before 2019, it reflects the old, slightly longer version of the TOEFL. So there’s one extra lecture in there, as a kind of bonus!

Other Free TOEFL Listening Practice

Free Magoosh TOEFL Listening Practice

• TOEFL Listening Practice Set One full lecture with 6 questions.
• Magoosh’s TOEFL Listening PDF A downloadable, printable TOEFL Listening PDF, with one lecture and one conversation, each with its own question set. Links to audio for the lecture and conversation are embedded in the PDF.
• Magoosh TOEFL Listening Question Types A guide to the seven question types for TOEFL Listening. This guide includes free audio clips and free sample questions of each type.
• TOEFL Listening Quiz: English Question Words This quiz, complete with audio tracks, is designed to help you understand the similar-sounding but very important English question words.
• Free Magoosh TOEFL Practice Test A full mock test of the TOEFL iBT, including a full TOEFL Listening section. Comes with a full answer key and answer explanations, as well as customized study recommendations.
• Magoosh TOEFL Free Trial Try our premium TOEFL prep service, with our video lessons and practice questions, free of charge. No payment info required!

Free ETS TOEFL Listening Practice Materials

• TOEFL Quick Prep. This resource is outdated, but still available through the Internet Archive. The practice sets reflect the old pre-2019 version of the TOEFL, but in the case of TOEFL Listening, you’ll still get practice similar to what you’d see on test day. Although the first two volumes of Quick Prep have audio-only for Listening, Magoosh has made unofficial audio for the lectures in the first volume and second volume.
• Official TOEFL Listening Practice Sets These PDFs from the ETS web site have a generous number of lecture and conversation quesiton sets. Unfortunately, there is no audio, only transcripts and questions.
• TOEFL Listening Videos This video tour of the TOEFL Listening section includes a number of partial samples of Listening audio, accompanied by related questions.
• Free official TOEFL Practice Test This exam is just like the real one, except for the lack of an onscreen timer. This test, of course, includes a full TOEFL Listening section.

Paid (but affordable) TOEFL Listening Practice

• Magoosh TOEFL Over 400 practice questions and over 400 video lessons, including tons of prep for TOEFL Listening.
• Official TOEFL iBT Tests, Volume One Five full-length TOEFL practice tests, with all of the questions taken from real TOEFL exams. Unfortunately, the onscreen timer for Listening works a little differently than it would on the real test. Still a fantastic resource for Listening practice.
• Official TOEFL iBT Tests, Volume Two Five more full-length authentic TOEFL practice tests, again with a slightly inauthentic onscreen timer for Listening.
• The Official Guide to the TOEFL Four full-length practice tests (again with the inauthentic Listening timer!), and a full chapter on the TOEFL Listening section with tutorials, advice, and additional practice sets.

A Final Thought on Practice Materials

While practice materials that imitate that real exam are quite valuable, allow me to let you in on another important fact: practice that builds general English listening skills is valuable too. There’s more to practice than just TOEFL Listening section audio files! So make sure you get in as much English listening practice as you can. Tune into a TED Talk. Listen to some English music sung by native speakers. Watch some English language TV or movies. These are great– and fun– resources to boost your listening skills for the TOEFL.

You don’t need to be a professional audio engineer to record narration. However, you do want to pay attention to what you’re doing and do the best job possible. Last week, we looked at some basic tips to record high-quality audio. Those tips leaned more on the technology. Today we’ll look at what you can do to get the best narration. I also added some tips from last week’s comments section.

1. Place your microphone in the right position.

If you place the microphone too close, you get that distorted clipping sound; and if you have it too far from the narrator, you pick up more ambient noise with the audio being less discernible.

By setting the microphone 6 to 12 inches from the narrator you’ll get a crisp clear voice. Also, make sure the microphone’s not right next to the computer so it doesn’t pick up the fan noise. Scooter also recommended keeping your mic cord away from your power cord.

2. Record a demo to make sure it all sounds right.

Tips For Having Student Listen To Audio Clips Video

A few years ago I was videotaping one of our executives. While he was rambling on I noticed that the mic was turned off. After he was finished, I told that it sounded great and now we’d do it for real. He wasn’t too happy.

Record a quick demo to make sure that everything is working as it should. Also, I recommend shutting down other applications that are not necessary at that moment. I’ve been doing this stuff for years and it never fails that when you work with multimedia you put a strain on your computer’s resources which can impact your recording session.

3. Listen to the audio playback with headphones.

Headphones help isolate the audio and you’ll be able to hear any problems with the narration better than if you listen with speakers. This is especially true if you’re using a laptop because their speakers tend to be subpar and kind of tinny.

4. Don’t get distracted with animations and annotations.

If you’re recording your audio using the rapid elearning software odds are that you’re also syncing animations and annotations with it. I tend to get distracted trying to time the animations with the narration and it is noticeable in my narration.

I usually record the narration first, and then go back and sync the animations. This helps me focus on capturing the best narration possible without being distracted trying to time the animations.

Tips For Having Student Listen To Audio Clips Online

5. Make sure your script is conversational and easy to read.

Practice reading it a few times to make sure it flows right. Look for words or phrases where you might stumble while recording.

As far as the actual script, some people read from the computer screen. I prefer printing out the script. If you do too, don’t squeeze everything into a tight paragraph with an 8 point font. Leave enough white space so it’s easy on the eyes. Also, make sure that the room is well lit so that the script can easily be read.

In the comments section, Dana Thomas makes a good point about where to place the script while recording. That’s a major consideration, because you want to be comfortable while reading.

6. Stand up while recording.

You’ll feel more energized and be able to breathe better. If you do sit, don’t slouch. Sit up straight and keep your chin out. Don’t let it drop to your chest.

7. Don’t ad-lib.

Stick to the script and don’t ad-lib. Odds are that you’ll have to do multiple takes. If you ad-lib, you’ll rarely have the same break points for editing. Sticking with the script lets you follow along with the audio and find a common edit point on re-takes.

8. Have plenty of liquids available.

Keep your vocal chords hydrated with clear liquids like water or a mild tea. Someone once told me to keep it at room temperature rather than cold. Avoid coffee, carbonated beverages, and milk products.

9. Get rid of the plosives.

Plosives are consonant sounds that create the famous 'popping p’s.' You can buy shields that sit in front of your mic to block out the offending sound. It’s easy enough to build one yourself using a wire ring and panty hose. Here’s a great tutorial to build your own mic screen.

Kat Keesling has some good tips for getting rid of the plosives. Many of the comments suggested that you speak over the mic rather into to avoid pushing air onto the mic.

10. Record 10 seconds of silence.

By recording some silence, you have a way to sample just the ambient noise and use a noise removal process to filter it out later. If you happen to have ambient noise (like an air conditioner) you’ll be able to filter some of that out. I’ve also used the ambient noise as a way to fill in gaps of silence so that the audio edits are a bit more seamless.

11. Relax and don’t rush your words.

Practice reading the script. Create a conversational tone. Pretend like you’re talking to someone rather than just reading a script. If you mess up, leave a noticeable pause and keep on going. It’s easy enough to cut the error out of the audio.

12. Mark your retakes.

If you do multiple takes or start and stop, leave some sort of marker. A good simple way to do this is to leave about 5 seconds of silence (so that it’s easy to find when you look at the wave form) and then indicate what it is, like “slide four, take two…”

13. Dampen the sound.

Tips For Having Student Listen To Audio Clips Free

There were some good comments on dampening the sound behind the narrator to avoid the audio bouncing into the microphone rather than dampening the sound in front. That makes sense to me. Sonnie recommended using two pillows. If it works for assassins who can quiet gunshots, there’s no reason it can’t work for you.

Tips For Having Student Listen To Audio Clips Youtube

Shane also suggested the “foam-brero” to diffuse the ambient sound coming from behind you. To assist Shane and those who might interested in giving this a shot, I have provided instructions on how to create your own foam somb
rero.

Other good resources and recommendations from the previous post’s comments section:

• How to Make the Most of Your Recorded Audio by Articulate MVP Spectre
• Audio Recording Tips by Retrogrrl
• Articulate 101: Recording Tips by Justin Wilcox

Two free applications that could come in handy:

• Audacity for audio recording and editing.
• Levelator to adjust the audio levels in your narration.

These tips will help you get started recording audio narration like a pro. If you have any other suggestions or tips, feel free to share them by clicking on the comments link.

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