PTE Time Management in Listening: How to manage your time effectively
As you work towards your goals in the listening section in PTE, it is important to be realistic about what PTE Listening time management techniques will work for you. However, there are a few ideas that seem to help almost every test taker. In this article, we will learn the strategies and suggestions to help you manage time in the listening section of PTE.
The tasks in PTE listening are to understand, summarize and answer questions that are posed. There is a lot of variety in the topics that are discussed, but there are specifically 8 different types of questions.
Summarise Spoken Text
The task for PTE Listening is to listen to a recording and frame a 50-70 word summary within 10 minute. This means that you need to be able to focus on the recording and understand the main points in order to summarize it in a concise way. You also need to be efficient with your time so that you can complete the task in the allotted amount of time.
Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers
The task in the PTE listening section is to listen to a conversation or lecture and answer multiple choice, multiple answer questions. The questions are designed to test your understanding of the main points and details of the audio.
Fill in the Blanks
When taking the PTE Listening test, you will be given a series of incomplete sentences. You must fill in the blanks with the correct words to make the sentence complete. This task tests your listening skills and your ability to understand spoken English.
Highlight Correct Summary
This includes listening to an audio recording and choosing one option which according to you, summarizes the recording in the best manner from the several possible options.
Multiple Choice Single Right Answer
It involves selecting one right answer for a multiple-choice question after listening to an audio recording.
Select Missing Word
This includes the selection of the most appropriate response in order to complete the beeped words in an audio recording.
Highlight Incorrect Words
This includes a paragraph with some of the words different than the words in the recording. Your job is to click on those words to highlight them as you listen through the recording.
Write from Dictation
This includes typing a short sentence accurately after listening -to its audio very carefully.
Why is it important to manage your time in the pte academic test?
It is important to manage your time in the pte academic test because if you do not, you might end up answering all the questions very quickly. This will not give you enough time to go back and check your answers carefully, which could result in careless mistakes. It also prevents you from rushing through your answers and making careless mistakes.
Tips for time management in PTE listening
When taking the PTE listening test, it is important to manage your time effectively. This means pacing yourself so that you do not rush through the questions and miss important information, but also making sure you have enough time to answer all of the questions. There are a few tips you can follow to help manage your time effectively in the PTE listening test.
How can you achieve a high level of efficiency while under time pressure?
It is important to take your time and listen carefully in order to answer the question correctly. You should also avoid making assumptions about the listening passage just because it’s too difficult for you, or because you don’t know the answer.
Some general tips to do well in the test
There are a few things you can do in order to manage your time effectively while taking the PTE Listening Module. 
- Be familiar with the whole format of the PTE Listening Module. This will help you understand which questions are difficult and may consume more time.
- Understand the critical tasks and their contribution to the score. You should always spend more time on questions which carry more points than on questions which are difficult.
- Prioritize tasks that carry the maximum weightage. This way you will be more realistic about your time management and will not important questions.
- Optimize time by practicing whole heartedly for each task. This ensures that you are ready for the test.
Do not spend extra time on these questions:
There are some questions in the listening section which are difficult but are not as rewarding as others. You should be careful while answering these questions as otherwise you might waste a significant amount of time for very few points. Your aim should be answering these questions in the least amount of time possible. These questions are:
- Multiple choice question single right answer
- Multiple choice question multiple right answer
- Highlight correct summary
- Highlight incorrect words
In these types of questions, you should try to finish answering the questions before the recording is over. If you cannot do that do not spend more than 15 seconds after the recording is over. If you think you cannot get an answer even after 30 seconds, make a guess and move on.
Important questions of Listening and how to answer them
As I already mentioned some questions are more important than the others and you should spend more time on these questions. Let’s discuss how you should approach these questions and how much time you should spend on these questions.
Summarise spoken text
You have fixed time to answer this question. Therefore, you will not need to worry about time management here. Remember even if you go to the next question before your 10 minutes time is over, you will not get any extra time for the next question. Therefore, spend the whole 10 minutes reading and editing your answer than moving to the next question.
Fill in the blanks
This is an important question in your test therefore you should be careful while answering the questions in this section. Once you have finished typing all the answers, read through the paragraph one more time to see if there are any mistakes. if you find any mistakes, then fix them. You have to be specially careful about the spelling errors or grammatical errors.
However, after finishing the recording, you should be able to move to the next question within around 30 seconds. During your practice if you find yourself spending more than 30 seconds on one question after the recording is over, then you may need to speed yourself up or practice more.
Highlight incorrect words
In this question type you may not need to spend any extra time because it will not be possible for you to remember what the recording was about and compare that with the given paragraph. However you may need to check if you’ve clicked on the right words as you heard the recording. If you find that you may have mistakenly clicked on the wrong word then you can click one more time to unselect that word. This is important because this question type has negative marking so you should not be making any guesses or click on the wrong word.
Write from dictation
This is the most important question type in listening. You should always spend some extra time checking your sentence for grammatical errors as well as spelling errors.
If you think that the word that you have written does not make any sense in the given context, trying to think logically and replace the word with a more logical option.
What this means is you may need to spend around one minute per sentence in this question type.
Therefore it’s extremely important that you have adequate time left at the end of listening test so that you can spend ample time while answering this question type .
Practice time management with Roman PTE mock tests
Roman PTE offers a variety of mock tests to help students prepare for their Pearson Test of English as a Second Language (PTE). The tests are regularly updated with the latest questions from different PTE centers around the world. Students can do these mock tests to learn about time management and also to see how prepared they are. We also provides helpful explanations of correct answers and tips for improving one’s score on the tests.
Conclusion
Overall, we can see that time management in listening is more important than in any of the selection in PTE test. Therefore, we have to make sure that we know everything there is to know about time management for PTE listening. In order to do this effectively, we have to make sure that we understand the complete format of the test, understand the difficulty level of each question type, understand the points carried by each question type and then make our strategy accordingly.
if you need help in any of this or if you need personalised guidance to excel in your PTE test then you can get in touch with us. You can also enroll in one of our online PTE plans.
We always make sure that you understand everything about this test and help you get your desired score in the shortest possible time.
