To do well on the TOEFL® Listening section of the Test of English as a Foreign Language, you must first understand how audio or verbal language transmission works, as well as develop the listening skills that we all need to decipher what we hear every day. Students prepare for the TOEFL® combining an intuitive general listening skill with specific strategies tailored to the types of questions and activities that will appear on the exam. To do well on the TOEFL®, you’ll need to master TOEFL® listening.
The TOEFL® exam is a widely used assessment tool for non-native English speakers to determine their proficiency in the English language. Academic goals, job placement, and, in some cases, immigration are all influenced TOEFL® scores. Depending on the exact version or format of the test, there are three or four components.
Examining the specific format of the TOEFL® Listening section is one of the most useful tools for doing well on the test. The majority of the TOEFL® listening modules are made up of multiple choice questions that the student must answer after listening to an audio recording. These multiple choice questions usually focus on details from a longer and more general audio passage or recorded discussion.
Aside from anticipating the types of questions that will appear on the TOEFL® Listening test, the student should be able to work on deciphering English sentences as they are spoken to him or her. Listening to English dialect in film, music, television, radio, or any other audio broadcast, as well as listening to video broadcasts with subtitles, are some strategies for improving these skills. Experts advise “immersion” in a language to help listeners pick up on the subtle differences between words and phrases.
It’s helpful to get advice on how to develop advanced listening skills as part of an overall assessment of skills that will prepare students for TOEFL® Listening. Much of what the listener misses is due to what some experts refer to as a “broken chain of context,” in which the context of the word has a significant impact on whether or not the listener understands it. Students who recognize this can work on “filling in the blanks” using what they already know to find clues and deduce the meaning of unfamiliar words or phrases. Hearing audio transmissions requires this skill because so much of the message can be garbled, drowned out background noise, or muffled the speaker’s manner of speaking. Working through these difficulties can help students achieve significantly higher scores on the TOEFL® Listening section of the exam.