The Listening section evaluates your ability to comprehend spoken English, an essential skill for academic success. In academic settings, listening typically serves one of three purposes:

1.Listening for Basic Comprehension - Understand the main idea, key points, and supporting details.

2.Listening for Pragmatic Understanding - Identify the speaker’s attitude, level of certainty, and the purpose or function of their statements.

3.Connecting and Synthesizing Information - Recognize how information is organized and how ideas relate (e.g., compare/contrast, cause/effect, steps in a process); Draw inferences, make conclusions, and connect various pieces of information; Detect topic shifts, introductions, and conclusions in lectures and conversations.

Listening Section Structure

• Lectures: 3 x 3-5-minute-long lectures, 6 questions per lecture
• Conversations: 2 x 30minute-long conversations, 5 questions per conversation
• Duration: 35 minutes

TOEFL iBT lectures mirror classroom scenarios. Some lectures feature professors speaking predominantly, with occasional student comments. Others involve active discussions between professors and students. Accompanying images indicate whether one or multiple speakers are present.

Conversations may occur at the meetings with professors or teaching assistants, or during service interactions with university staff. These are typically academic or administrative in nature, such as discussing course requirements, making housing payments, or seeking library assistance. Images provided help visualize the setting and the speakers' roles.

Question Formats

The Listening section includes academic lectures and conversations with natural speech patterns. You are allowed to take notes throughout. Questions that follow the listening material primarily consist of multiple-choice formats but also include:

• Multiple-choice questions with more than one correct answer.
• Sequencing tasks (e.g., ordering steps in a process).
• Matching tasks (e.g., categorizing objects or text in a table).