Listening is the first test on test day.

You are likely to feel your most nervous before the Listening test starts. It’s really important you are aware of this and take steps to reduce this. You don’t want your nerves affecting your performance.

These tips will help you relax as much as possible and be ready to listen.

1. Have everything you need on your table in front of you. Take more than one pen or pencil so you can easily swap what you are writing with, if you need to, during the test. Don’t waste time sharpening pencils, take a bunch of them, ready-sharpened.
2. When the audio starts, the voice will read out the instructions printed on the front of answer booklet. Read this information as it is said. It is a really effective way to focus your concentration on what you’re about to do. Plus, this information includes the context to the audio which will also help you to focus on what you are about to hear.
3. During the 1 minute you have to read the questions, skim quickly through all of the sections to get a general overview of the test. Then, return to the front and read section 2 and 3 in detail (Section 1 is completed as an example). You can underline key words if you wish but most importantly, you should read the information you are given carefully so you know what to expect.
4. When the audio for section 1 starts, read the heading and the answer as you hear them. This will help familiarise you to the speakers’ voices.
5. Repeat for Part B.
6. At the end of Part B, during the 2 minutes you have to check your answers, check both Parts A and B. Don’t take this as an opportunity to have a break and a drink of water. Keep checking until told to stop. Look for incomplete answers, messy answers which you can make clearer to the assessor and any blank spaces. A guess is better than nothing, so always try to write something down for each question.

Following these tips should help you perform your best on test day.

Listening to you

At the OET Centre, we get a lot of questions from concerned students preparing for the test about their answers to the Listening test. Listening Part A in particular.

To soothe some of the stress from these and other students, this week’s post is going to cover the following FAQs:

1. What to write
2. How assessors grade spelling and grammar errors and use of abbreviations
3. Which answers will be considered correct.

What a Listening Part A answer booklet looks like

Each section includes a Heading (and sometimes sub-headings as you can see in this example) and a bulleted line for each mark available. In the example left, the sub-heading ‘Specialist’s view’ has 2 marks available (seen in the box on the right hand side) and so there are 2 bulleted lines.

Writing your answers

• To get the marks for the 2 answers in our example, you must have your answer on or around those two lines. If, for some reason, you wrote your answers under the next sub-heading ‘Patient’s view’, they would not be marked.
• It doesn’t matter if you write both answers on the same line or the individual lines given. As long as the answers are on one or other line, this is acceptable.
• If you write part of your answer to the left of the bulleted lines or next to the sub-heading, this is also acceptable.

Look at this image for the answers to the subheading ‘Specialist’s view’. All the space highlighted yellow is included as part of your answer by the assessors. All the space highlighted in red is not included as part of your answer to this sub-heading by the assessors.

How assessors grade your answers

• Spelling and grammar mistakes are accepted by the assessors as long as the meaning of what you have written is clear. E.g. if you wrote ‘pewmonea’ for pneumonia, this would be accepted as correct. Alternatively,  if your wrote ‘visit sister house every week’ (missing off the ‘s’ from ‘visit’ and ‘s from ‘sister’) this would be accepted as correct.
• As a note-taking task, abbreviations and symbols are recommended as mentioned in a recent test tip post. There isn’t a standard list of abbreviations and symbols which the assessors accept but they are familiar with all common abbreviations.

Which answers will be considered correct

The answers for the 2 marks in the sub-heading ‘Specialist’s view’ are:

(being) pregnant not an issue/no problem

think about whether to breastfeed OR breastfeeding takes calcium from bones/ may cause fractures

• Your answer must be complete. For example if you missed the word ‘not’ or ‘no’ out of the first answer, you would not get the mark.
• The second answer is even more critical. If you only write ‘whether to breastfeed’ or ‘think about breastfeed’ this would not get the mark as there are two parts to this answer. 1) thinking about a decision to be made AND 2) breastfeeding.
• If you write something extra between those two answers for example: ‘follow a healthy diet’, this answer is incorrect and is ignored. It doesn’t stop you from getting 2 marks for the other 2 answers you have written down. The assessors would see both correct answers and, even though there was an incorrect answer between them, give you 2 marks.

One final point

Your handwriting does not have to be beautiful but it must be legible. Remember that someone is trying to find as many marks as possible for you. To do this they must be able to read and understand what you have written. When you’ve completed a pratice test, give your answers to someone unfamiliar with your handwriting and ask if they can read what you’ve written. If they can, then your handwriting will be fine for the OET assessors.

Abbreviations and symbols are a useful way of helping you to write down relevant information while you listen.

They are also something you will use in the workplace.

While there isn’t a standard list of abbreviations and symbols which OET assessors accept, they are trained to be flexible. The best place to look for commonly used abbreviations in English is on the Internet. You can compare the most popular results and check that the abbreviations appear in more than one list.

Examples of abbreviations include:

BP                          blood pressure

N+V                       nausea and vomiting

info.                       information

gen.                       generally, in general

Examples of symbols include:

↑                           increase, high, up

↓                           decrease, low, down

→                         led to, result, consequence

<                          less than

It takes practice to be able to use abbreviations and symbols effectively, so you should start including them as part of your preparation now. Once you are familiar with their meaning and use, you should notice that they will increase your speed at writing while you listen.

Find out more about the Listening test and how to improve your Listening Part B skills.