Understanding the TOEFL Listening Section:

The TOEFL Listening section tests the candidate’s ability to understand spoken English in modern learning environments. The current TOEFL Listening section uses short, focused listening tasks and may include: listen and choose a response, listen to a conversation, listen to an announcement and listen to an academic talk. The section is multistage, so the number of items and time may vary.  Candidates are therefore expected to listen for meaning, organization and speaker intent rather than attempting to remember every word. The listening material may include campus situations, announcements and academic talks. Candidates may hear different English accents, including North American, British, Australian and New Zealand accents. It is in their best interest to understand the main point or purpose of a listening passage, identify specific facts and important details, understand why a speaker says something, recognize the speaker’s attitude or degree of certainty, understand how information is organized, make inferences and draw conclusions and connect information from different parts of a conversation or talk.

It is worth noting that the candidate does not need to understand every word in the audio before answering the questions. Instead, the candidate should listen for meaning, take brief notes, identify the evidence, eliminate wrong answers and choose the best answer. The goal here is not to memorize the entire recording. The goal is to understand its structure, important ideas and speaker’s purpose.