Are you preparing for your IELTS test but worried about the commonly used difficult words?
You’ve come this far, we can help push you over the line!
With help from our support services and official IELTS markers, we can build on your existing knowledge and help boost your score to where it needs to be.
But first, what is the IELTS Listening test?
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.
What else is there?
In the IELTS Listening test, the recording is played once only. It is important to concentrate from the beginning until the end for the whole 30 minutes.
The IELTS Listening test is scored out of 40 and then converted to a band score which ranges from band 1 to band 9.
To score full marks in the Listening test, you need to build your vocabulary and understand the common mistakes to avoid.
A variety of voices and native-speaker accents are used in the Listening test as IELTS is an international test.
Spelling practice for the IELTS Listening test
Correct spelling is important in the Listening test. If the spelling is incorrect, then it will be marked as wrong.
Here are some examples of the IELTS Listening tricky words that may be spelled in an incorrect way:
Notice when the word form changes:
Example | Incorrect | Correct |
|---|---|---|
Benefit | benefitial | beneficial |
Influence | influencial | influential |
Circumstance | circumstancial | circumstantial |
Maintain | maintainance | maintenance |
Refer | refered | referred |
Begin | begining | beginning |
Notice silent letters in consonant clusters:
Incorrect | Correct | |
|---|---|---|
The silent (nm) | enviroment | environment |
The silent (xc) | exite | excite |
The silent (g) | privilje | privilege |
The silent (sc) | concious | conscious |
More spelling practice for IELTS Listening? Choose which one is correct:
absence | absense |
acheeve | achieve |
colleague | colleage |
deliberete | deliberate |
attack | atack |
langauge | language |
Most commonly used words in IELTS Listening
We all know that practice makes perfect, so if you really want to become good at spelling, disable this function in Word. Write out a list of words that you find difficult to spell and then turn on the function. You will then see if you have made mistakes.
Saying the word, writing it, checking it, and then repeating the process, will help you to remember how to spell words correctly.
Want to test your skills? Try and spell all the commonly misspelled words displayed in the below table:
library | environment | restaurant | customer | believe | modern |
difficult | controversy | separate | comparison | skiing | business |
professor | avenue | nuclear | modern | basically | commitment |
conscious | disappear | exciting | boring | rhythm | immediately |
necessary | original | realistic | receive | February | tendency |
obesity | marriage | solar | fuel | friendly | until |
beautiful | highway | percentage | million | thousand | hundred |
fluctuate | peak | recover | musician | computer | software |
video | murder | topic | temporary | unfortunately | disadvantage |
argument | Wednesday | neighbour | foreign | opportunity | because |
Quick exercise? Rewrite the following paragraph by correcting the spelling errors:
In the short-answer qustion type, you are reqired to read a question and then write a short answer using infromation from the listenning text. Sometimes test takers are given a qustion which asks them to list tow or three points.
A word limit is given, for excample, ‘NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER’. If you use more than the word lemit, your answer will be marked as incorrect so check the word limit carefully for each question. Contracted words will not be tested, e.g. ‘don’t’. Hifenated words count as single words, e.g. ‘polic-man’.
Review your answers here!
Practice makes perfect
As with all tests, the key to success is to be prepared and to practise.
Take the first step. Visit our IELTS Prepare hub to practise and you will soon be well on your way to getting the band score you need!