Tips to Ace TOEFL Listening section | Listening for TOEFL PDF Download

Standard Multiple Choice

You likely have a lot of experience with these types of questions. For each question there are four answer choices, only one of which is correct. You’ll need to choose the correct one. This is the most common question type you’ll see in TOEFL Listening.

Sample Question

Tips for Answering

• Read every answer choice. This may seem like obvious advice, but on the day of the test it’s easy to see an option that looks pretty good, choose it, and move along to the next question without checking to make sure there isn’t a better option. ETS will try to make some answer choices sound like the right answer when they’re actually not. Reading through all your options will help you avoid getting fooled.
• Take notes while listening to the audio recording (how to do this is discussed in more detail below). Make them short and clear so you can easily review them when answering questions. They’ll often help you remember points you may have forgotten and that will help you answer questions correctly.

Multiple-Answer Questions

These questions are like the standard multiple-choice questions except they can have more than one correct answer. You’ll need to get all the answer options correct in order to receive credit for these questions.

Sample Question

Tips for Answering

• Questions with more than one answer will also be labeled as such, and you’ll also be told how many correct answers there are, so be sure to pay close attention when answering these questions so you don’t miss important information.
• For these questions especially, make sure you read through each answer choice to be sure you don’t miss a correct answer. You don’t get partial credit for these questions, so you’ll need to select every correct answer choice in order to get the question right.

“Replay” Questions

For these questions, you’ll hear a short part of the clip played again, and you’ll then be asked a question on that specific portion of the clip. They then follow the format of standard multiple-choice questions. This is the only time on the Listening section where you’ll get to listen to part of the audio recording again.

Sample Question

Tips for Answering

• Even if you took good notes while listening to the complete audio recording, pay close attention when the short clip is replayed. You’ll often be asked about a specific detail from the clip that you wouldn’t remember just by looking at your notes.
• Focus primarily on the clip that was replayed as opposed to what was said in the rest of the recording. For almost all these types of questions, you’ll be able to choose the correct answer based just on the clip, so you don’t need to worry about remembering what happened in the rest of the recording.