Listening Fill in the Blanks: typing while you listen

In this task you read, listen and type at the same time, and the recording will not wait for you. The classic way to lose marks is to stop on one word you missed and lose the next two while you think about it. The fix is to do your thinking before the audio starts.

Read ahead and predict the gaps

Use the moment before the recording begins, however short it is.

1. Read the whole text once at normal speed, so you know what it is about.
2. For each gap, look at the words on either side and decide what kind of word is missing: a noun, a verb, an adjective, a plural, an -ed form.
3. Notice the word just before each gap. That is your cue: when you hear it, your fingers should already be moving.

The text gives you the shape of the missing word and the audio gives you the word itself. A gap in "decide whether to ____ it" has to be a verb, and a gap between "a" and a noun is very likely an adjective, whatever the speaker says. Knowing that, you only have to hear which one.

Type as you hear, and do not chase

Type each missing word as soon as you hear it. Do not wait for the end of the sentence, and do not try to carry three words in your head, because the speaker will have moved on before you finish the first.

Keep your eyes moving along the text with the voice, so you always know which gap is coming next. If you miss a word, leave the gap and look at the next one. A missed word costs you one word. Staring at it costs you several. If you lose your place completely, find the cue word before the next gap and rejoin the speaker there. And if the answer to an old gap comes to you while the speaker is in the middle of a long phrase, you can slip back and fill it in.

Spelling counts

A word with a spelling error earns nothing, however clearly you heard it. Words that look easy and still go wrong include different, government, environment, necessary and received. Do not stop to fix a spelling in the middle of a sentence, because the speaker will not wait for you. Type quickly, and use any spare seconds, such as the pause after the last sentence, to check each word you typed, letter by letter.

A worked example

Here is a transcript I made up for illustration, as it might look on screen, with the gaps numbered.

Before the audio starts, you can already say this much:

• Gap 1 is a past-tense verb, because "last spring" fixes the time.
• Gap 2 is a singular noun, something you can borrow.
• Gap 3 is an adjective, sitting between "a" and "one".
• Gap 4 is an -ed form, because it follows "have" and leads into "about".
• Gap 5 is a noun, probably a plural.
• Gap 6 is a verb in its base form, because it follows "to".

The speaker then says: launched, bicycle, different, complained, results, expand. The slips to expect are launch with no -ed, result with no -s, and spelling errors such as diferent and complaned. The first two are exactly the ones your predictions would have prevented. Treat predictions as a net, not a script, though: if the audio gives you a word of a different shape from the one you expected, type what you heard.

Practise with transcripts

You can build your own exercises from any news item or podcast that comes with a transcript.

1. Copy the transcript and replace six words with lines. Choose a mixture of nouns, verbs and adjectives, not only the easy ones.
2. Put it away for a day, so the exact words fade.
3. Predict each gap first, then play the audio once and type as you hear, as you would in the test.
4. Check your answers, and write every miss in your error log with the reason: ending, spelling or not heard.

Once six gaps feels comfortable, raise it to ten. The same listen-and-type skill drives Write from Dictation, where there is no text at all, and the spelling habits are covered in the easy marks in spelling and punctuation. To try the real thing against a countdown, use the practice tests on this site, where the scores are estimates and not official results.