Improving Your Skills

Listening skills for PTE Academic

General listening skills

You will be tested on different listening skills in

PTE Academic. To prepare, you will need to:
• understand every word in some tasks, e.g. Write
from dictation.
• be able to read and listen simultaneously,
e.g. Multiple choice, choose single answer.
• take notes to help complete a task after
a recording ends, e.g. Summarize spoken text.
Listening skills improve with patience. Look at the
photos. Read what the students say about how they
have improved their listening skills over time. ‘I’ve developed a system
for taking notes while I listen
to show the relationship
between ideas, using symbols.’
‘I find short talks or podcasts
online where I understand about
70 percent of the words. That
way I still hear new words, but I
understand enough to guess
their meaning.’

‘When I find a new word,

I check the pronunciation as
well as the meaning, using an
online dictionary.’
‘I like to listen to a short
audio recording and type what
I hear. Some online videos show
subtitles, and so I keep a list of
the kinds of things I often miss.’

‘I prefer video because the

visual clues help me to
follow the language.’

1 The Official Guide to PTE Academic, Digital Resources © Pearson Education Limited 2020
Develop listening fluency When you are taking notes, you might find it easier
to represent links between ideas with a symbol,
Developing your ability to listen fluently is essential for example:
for feeling confident and performing well in listening

IMPROVING YOUR SKILLS

tasks.
Make a list of all the things that make it difficult to pay
attention while you listen. Then answer the questions. because:
• Do you allow personal worries or negative
define: =
feelings stop you from listening?
• Have you got any bad listening habits, such as What: Wt?
trying to understand every word or translating
while you listen?
Look at your list and make a plan to develop
techniques to combat frustration. Think about the Develop language for listening
points below when making your plan.
Use these strategies.
• When you don’t understand something, it’s
• Pay attention to words in context. It’s more
natural to feel frustrated or worried. What helps
effective to learn phrases than individual words.
you focus again after feeling frustrated?
• Learn signposting words. Words that help you
• Try to remember that in most tasks you will not
identify the direction a talk is about to take,
need to understand every single word. Also, you
e.g. this means, however, for example, will help
will not need to complete every task perfectly to
you recognise the relationship between ideas,
do well in a test.
as well as the topics.
• Know when a task is becoming too difficult or
too time-consuming in a test.

Develop active listening I’d like to move on Now, turning to

Become an active listener. Use these strategies.
• Concentrate on what the speaker is saying by
trying to re-phrase it or repeat the ideas back.
• Listen to the complete message rather than the
different parts. Is the speaker in favour of an Expanding on
idea or against it? Does the speaker have strong that idea
arguments and examples or just a list of ideas?
• Pay attention to any information that is repeated.
Repetition often suggests something is important.

Develop listening for comprehension

Listening for detail, especially key information, is
another important skill to ensure you focus on
developing your listening skills. Use these strategies.
• Practise note-taking regularly. If possible,
store your notes with a link to the recording
somewhere safe. Wait a month, and then repeat
the note-taking activity. Compare your new notes
to your old notes. Have you improved?
• Make sure you listen to a range of accents, speeds
and topics, as well as to talks with background
noise. If you can’t find recordings with
background noise, play any talk with a recording
of coffee shop noises at the same time. You can
find these recordings online.
Specific listening skills
Identifying topics quickly
1 Match lists of words 1–5 with the topics in
the box.
Building design   Chemicals in farming
Customer relations
Saving sea animals   The first trip to Mars
1 dolphin, fishing, warming, ice, polar bears,
coastal pollution
Saving sea animals
2 homes, offices, mall, construction, department,
site, workplace, solar power, heating

2 The Official Guide to PTE Academic, Digital Resources © Pearson Education Limited 2020
 3 friendly, feedback, sell, advertise, product,
service, promote, negative experience, survey
4 fields, crop, soil, plants, leaves, food, safe/
harmful, pollution
5 discover, space, journey, oxygen, planet,
survive, lonely, risk, land
Make your own topic lists. This can help you organise
vocabulary by topic. Have the lists ready to apply to
any topic or content in any listening task.
2 Go online and search for major trends in +
healthcare/marketing/technology/etc. Make
a list of the words that commonly appear.
Check the pronunciation of those words in
an online dictionary.
Be prepared! Although coursebooks often put
all of the language for one topic together in one
unit – because this makes the language easier –
during PTE Academic you will need to deal with
a variety of topics across tasks. The quick change
of topic can make tasks feel more difficult, so
practise listening to a variety of topics during
the same study session.
3 It is good academic style to introduce each new
idea clearly. Find a news report or an academic
talk online. Answer the questions.
1 Can you identify the introduction immediately?
What phrases help you do that?
2 Can you predict how the idea will be
developed, e.g. reasons, examples or analysis?
How does the speaker do this?
3 If you only understood the main idea by the
end, go back and listen again. Was there
a sentence at the beginning to help you
understand the topic much more quickly?
If not, could you add one?
Listening out for signpost and
organisational words
Being able to recognise this kind of language will
help you follow the structure of what is being said. It
will also help you identify when the speaker is going
to change direction, make a key point or emphasise
something. Keep a list of any signpost words that
you hear or learn.
3 The Official Guide to PTE Academic, Digital Resources
4 Match signpost phrases 1–6 with function a–c.
a emphasise a point
b move on to a completely new idea
IMPROVING YOUR SKILLS
c give more information about a point just made
1 Now, let’s turn to … 
2 Let’s go into a bit more detail. 
3 OK, so what’s next? 
4 Please note that … 
5 It’s important to remember that … 
6 Well, what does all this mean? 
Using words you already know
You can use words you know already to help you
understand the overall meaning and guess new
words, by focusing on the context around them.
5 What words would you expect to hear in
contexts 1–7?
1 a problem
 challenge, danger, issue, difficulty
2 a solution
3 reasons why another person’s ideas are wrong
4 reasons for a suggestion
5 examples
6 ordered by time
7 comparison and contrast
6 Find a recording with a transcript, for example
some video or TV streaming apps display
transcripts and/or subtitles while you watch.
1 Listen and guess what percentage of the words
you already know.
2 Look at the transcript. Did you guess, more or
less, the right amount of words?
© Pearson Education Limited 2020
 3 What words are left? How important are they?
Can you guess the meaning?
4 Look up the words in a dictionary. Did you
guess correctly?
7 Find a recording where you understand 50–70
percent of what the speaker says. What helped
you understand the recording? Tick (✓) the
statements that are true for you. The speaker:
• repeated some key words and phrases.
• introduced some factual information that
I understood, e.g. dates and numbers.
• summarised the idea at the beginning or
the end.
• used paraphrase to explain difficult words.
• showed a graph, chart or notes and that
helped me.
Remember that PTE Academic tests a range
of ability levels. You probably won’t be able to
answer all of the questions correctly. Do your best
at everything, but don’t worry when you come across
a question that is above your level. You are very
unlikely to need to complete every task perfectly
to achieve the score you need.
Understanding pronunciation to aid
listening
Make sure that you can hear and identify correctly
features of spoken English. There are around twenty
vowel sounds and twenty-four consonant sounds
in English. Can you recognise them all? Some words
are pronounced differently in American and British
English, e.g. garage, advertisement, vitamin, water.
Make sure you listen to a range of different accents.
If you are unsure of the pronunciation of a word,
look it up in an online dictionary, such as the Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English. You’ll find different
pronunciations when you click on these icons.
4 The Official Guide to PTE Academic, Digital Resources
8 Do you know at least two different ways of
pronouncing the words and phrases in the box?
Listen to the words/phrases on their own and in
example sentences.
IMPROVING YOUR SKILLS
and   at   can   do you
going to   got to have   has been   of
some   to   want to
Academic speakers use sentence stress, pausing and
intonation to make it easier to follow their ideas.
Make sure you pay attention to those things.
9 Go online and search for ‘great public speaking’.
Find a recording and answer the questions.
1 Does the speaker say important words more
slowly or more loudly?
2 Do they pause before an important point?
3 When does their intonation rise or fall?
10 Find a video of an online comparison or review
of two products, e.g. two different computers.
Answer the questions.
1 Which words does the speaker stress,
e.g. signpost words like both or but, the name
of one of the products, the feature they’re
drawing attention to?
2 How do they use intonation to show that
they’re listing features or that they haven’t
finished yet?
3 What pronunciation clues suggest that they’re
summarising their choice?
© Pearson Education Limited 2020