Strangely
enough, when we listen to speech that is in our native language, we don’t hear
everything, not really. Among the factors that contribute to this phenomenon is
that the person we’re talking to might not pronounce some words distinctly or
there may be a background noise. Besides, it’s typical of native speakers to
reduce or omit some sounds, even a few of them in one word, so you can imagine
what happens at the sentence level, let alone longer stretches of listening
input.
So how do
we manage to understand what we hear? Well, it’s all in our minds, or brains,
to be more specific. Our brain is responsible for processing the information we
hear, and to do this job well, it does not solely rely on what we actually
hear. At times, the brain has to fill the gaps in the stream of audio input.
This process is possible, among other things, because the brain stores the
information related to our general knowledge, knowledge of specific subject
matter, life experience, and so on.
Have you
noticed that when listening to foreign speech, it’s easier to understand the
things that you expect to be mentioned? Moreover, sometimes we just know what
somebody else is going to say! It’s because of all that information kept in our
brain, which serves as a solid foundation for further data to be built on.
Normally
audio information is processed in our brain automatically, but on IElTS there
are things you can do to facilitate this process, and this is where
anticipation and prediction come into play.
In the tips
on IELTS Listening I mentioned that it’s really important to be able to predict
the answers even before you listen to the recording. Before each recording (as
explained in IELTS Listening. Test format)
starts, you’re given some time to look through the tasks to be covered in this
particular audio. You’ve got to do it fast, and there’s usually just enough
time to scan through the questions and quickly make an educated guess at what
could go in the gaps.
How it works
As I said
in tips on IELTS Listening, Section 1 of the
Listening module is probably the most productive in terms of what you can
anticipate there; there’s usually at least one question the exact answer to
which you can guess.
In some
cases your prediction efforts will be minimal because the fields you’ll need to
fill in will be marked appropriately as in the example below.
ATS Conference Application
Name:
Elizabeth 1 …………………………………..
Address: 2 …………………………….. Road
Email: 3 ……………………….@gmail.com
Date of birth: 4 ……………………………… 1982
Phone: 5 ………………………………………
|
Here it’s
quite obvious that for question one you’ll have to put down the applicant’s
last name, in question 2 you’ll expect to hear the house number and part of the
street name, in question three you’ll write the first part of the email, and in
question 4 you’re likely to hear a date and a month or only a month. The
answers to questions 1-3 might be spelt, so be prepared to that. Obviously, in
question 5 you’ll need to write down some numbers. Therefore, be focused and ready
to fill them in; if you’re not, you might easily miss them.
It gets
even more interesting when it comes to completing sentences or their parts. This
is where you sometimes have a pretty good shot at figuring out the correct
answer; to do that, you’ll need to think about the context and the grammar.
In the
narrow meaning we’re interested in the word context, which is made up of the
words that come before it and those that follow it. In the broader meaning
we’re dealing with the context of an idea or an event, in which case we’re
working with the general situation, the circumstances creating the setting for
a certain phenomenon and explaining it fully.
When it
comes to grammar, you’re usually able to predict which part of speech you’re
going to need, like a noun (a word that refers to a person or a thing, e.g. car, sister,
tennis), a verb (a word denoting an action, e.g. walk, smile, know), an adjective (a word describing a noun, e.g. beautiful, qualified, exciting), a
numeral (a number, e.g. 200, 1.5, 3rd),
an ing-word (e.g. swimming, studying,
pondering), a preposition or a
conjunction (words like and, if, of, at,
in), a pronoun (words like it, her,
me, us), etc., or a combination of these. If you’re dealing with verbs, you
should consider the appropriate tense and number; if you expect to hear a noun,
you might also think about its number and whether it’s a common noun (a noun
that isn’t a name of a particular thing, e.g. city) or a proper noun (a noun denoting a particular thing, e.g. New York).
Now, let’s
see how thinking about the context and the grammar can help us predict answers.
Before you move on to reading my thoughts on these tasks, I suggest you first
try to make your own predictions of what the answers could be.
Questions 1-10
Compete
the notes below
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS or A
NUMBER for each answer
Event Details
Type of event: Example Dragon Boat Race
Race details
Day & Date: 1 …………………………
Place: Brighton 2 …………………………
Registration time: 3 …………………………
Sponsorship
Team details
|
© Jakeman V., McDowall C. Longman IELTS
Practice Test Plus
I suppose that you already know what should go
in questions 1 through 3, so I’ll move on to question 4. The title of this
subsection (‘Sponsorship’) and the word ‘raise’ tell me that we’re dealing with
money here. Therefore, I expect to hear a number and, probably, a currency. In
question 5 the words ‘trip to’ are mentioned, so I reckon there’ll be a proper
noun, like the name of a tourist destination.
I can see that question 6 has the word ‘elect’.
Now, I know that people in one team usually elect senior team members, and
since a senior member of a crew is its captain, I expect the answer to be
‘captain’. Question 7 is related to underage team members (‘under 18s’) and
indicates that they have to have something to enter the race. I guess it’s some
kind of permit, but we’ll see. Questions 8, 9 and 10 give me almost nothing and
all I can think of is that I’ll need some nouns to answer them (though you
might have been able to figure out more, let me know if you have:) )
Listen to the audio © Jakeman V., McDowall C. Longman IELTS Practice Test Plus
Well, let’s see how successful my prediction efforts were. I was right in my assumptions about questions 4 and 5, and I figured out the exact answer to question 6, not bad. My suggestion about a permit for question 7 was also right, and, to be honest, I could have guessed that teenagers would have to bring parents’ permission. There was no way I’d have been able to predict the answers to questions 8 and 9, but the answer to question 10 turned out really easy, this one could have been anticipated.
What does this give us?
To some up,
predicting can help you achieve the following purposes:
- it helps you to better familiarize yourself with the questions (the few seconds that you’ll be thinking about a possible answer can cause your memory to make a mental note of the question; thus, it’ll be easier to recognize it in the recording)
- it helps you to understand what exactly to listen for
- if you make the right guess, you’ve got a better chance at hearing the answer (for instance, in question six it might be difficult for some test takers to recognize the word ‘captain’. However, if they prepare themselves for it by guessing that ‘captain’ is a very likely answer, it might make all the difference)
- if you missed the part related to one of the questions or didn’t understand it, effective guessing can help you put down the correct answer and receive a better score anyway!
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