The IELTS Listening is the same for both the IELTS Academic test and General Training test. The Listening test assesses your ability to understand main ideas, detailed information, opinions, purpose and attitudes of the speakers, as well as your ability to follow the development of ideas.

You will listen to 4 recordings in your Listening test and need to answer 40 questions based on these recordings. The first two recordings deal with situations you might experience in an everyday context. The last two recordings, however, focus on situations that might occur in an education or training context.

In recordings 1 and 3 you will hear a conversation between two or more speakers, however in recordings 2 and 4 will hear a monologue. You will need to answer questions connected to the recordings ranging from multiple choice to matching information, headings, features and sentence endings, as well as sentence, summary, note, table, diagram or flow-chart completion.

If you want to apply for an extension to family, spouse or partner visa to the UK, you will most likely need to take Life Skills A2 test to prove your English listening and speaking skills.

The IELTS for UKVI tests are a secure English-language test (SELT) accepted by the United Kingdom Visa and Immigration Department as proof of your English-language proficiency. Life Skills A2 tests your listening and speaking skills at the level of A2 in the Common European Framework (CEFR) in a 16 to 18-minute test with an examiner and one other test taker. The second test taker’s performance will not affect your test results.

You will be assessed on your ability to listen and respond to spoken English where you have to obtain and convey basic information and communicate on familiar topics.

The examiner might ask you to describe a topic, give opinions or preferences and justify those, and explain and expand on a topic. You will also be expected to communicate with both the examiner and the other test taker.