IELTS Listening Part 4: Note Completion in an Academic Talk

Part 4 is the section where candidates say the words were clear and still count four or five gaps they could not fill. The recording is rarely the problem. The sheet is.

Everything about the test on this page comes from the official IELTS and British Council pages published by the test owners, read on 3 November 2026. Every note-completion extract, every note line and every answer was written for this page: no live test item is reproduced, no practice site is ranked, and no band score is promised.

The method here is deliberately narrow. It answers one question — why a clear academic talk still produces a half-filled note sheet — and it stays inside the ielts listening tips for band 9 that actually touch the answer sheet: predicting the missing word class, tracking the signpost phrases that locate an answer, and keeping every answer inside the word limit.

Why Part 4 punishes understanding without a target

The official format is short and worth reading once as a shape rather than a list of rules.

• The paper has four parts with ten questions in each part, and the questions follow the order of the information in the recording.
• Parts 1 and 2 are everyday social situations. Parts 3 and 4 are educational or training situations, and in Part 4 only one person speaks on an academic subject.
• The recordings are heard once only, in a range of accents that includes British, Australian, New Zealand and North American.
• The paper takes about 30 minutes. On paper you then have ten minutes to move your answers onto the answer sheet; on computer there are two minutes of review time.

None of that mentions understanding, and that is the point. Part 4 asks for two things at once, and they pull in opposite directions: follow an argument, and hold a written target in view while you do it.

In Parts 1 to 3 there is usually a second voice — an agent, a guide, a tutor — whose reply confirms whether you followed the thread. Part 4 has no such checkpoint. The talk also has no change of setting to reset your attention, so a single missed sentence can turn into two or three empty gaps before you notice. Academic talks of the kind used here announce their own structure in plain words — what the speaker will cover, when a new factor starts, when a point is being qualified. Those announcements are audible even when the vocabulary is dense, and they are the cheapest thing on the paper to prepare for.

So the honest answer to why a clear talk still costs marks is not listening ability. It is that understanding is measured per sentence, while the mark is measured per word on a note line you may not have read carefully enough.

What note completion actually asks you to write

The official question-type list calls this family form, note, table and flow-chart completion. Note completion is not a Part 4 exclusive: the official free samples use note completion from a Part 1 recording and table completion from a Part 4 talk by a lecturer. The method below is written for Part 4 because that is where a single academic voice makes the reading step hardest, and it transfers to any of the four parts.

Three constraints decide the mark, and all three are visible before the audio starts.

Constraint	What the paper gives you	What you must decide before the audio
Word class	the words on either side of the gap	noun, verb, adjective, adverb or number
Word limit	the instruction above the set, for example ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER	how many words you may write, and which words to delete on transfer
Unit or format	£, %, km, a date or a time	whether the answer is a figure, a unit or a word
Order	numbered gaps that follow the recording	where your eye must be when the answer arrives

The instruction is printed on the paper, not hidden in the audio. Candidates who lose marks to the limit usually do it in one of two ways: they write the article that belongs to the answer, or they write a unit the note line already contains. Both are avoidable at the transfer stage, which is why the ten minutes after the recording (two on computer) are part of the method rather than a formality.

Reading the notes before the audio starts

Word class is the first filter

A gap is never a blank. It has grammar around it, and that grammar names the answer class before you hear anything.

• An article or possessive before the gap points to a noun: the ___ of the port.
• A preposition before the gap points to a noun or an -ing form: before ___ the samples.
• A figure or a unit before the gap points to a number: a rise of ___ per cent.
• A missing verb after a modal points to a verb: the team must ___ the survey.

Write one letter beside each gap while you read — N, V, ADJ or NUM. It takes seconds, and it turns the recording into a search for something specific rather than a stream of words you are trying to hold.

The word limit decides what you write, not what you hear

Two original note lines show how the limit works in practice.

• Deposit: £___ with the limit ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER accepts 150 and rejects £150 written as two items when the unit is already printed.
• The tour lasts ___ hours accepts two, not two hours, because the noun after the gap is part of the note line.

The pattern is the same in both: the speaker gives more words than you may write. Copy the meaning while it is fresh, then delete anything the note line already contains. On paper this second pass happens in the ten transfer minutes; on computer, use the two review minutes to check articles, plurals and units only — not to re-read the whole sheet.

Mark the order, not just the gaps

Because the questions follow the recording, you also know the direction of travel. Before each part, mark the first word of the next note line every two or three gaps. If one answer slips away, that mark is your jumping-off point, and you lose one mark instead of three. Staying on a lost question is the most expensive habit in the paper.

Signpost phrases that put the answer one sentence away

A signpost is not vocabulary to learn by heart; it is a label for what the sentence is doing. The table below lists the shapes that appear most often in a single-speaker academic talk, and what each one means for your pencil.

Signpost you hear	What the sentence is doing	Where the answer usually sits
Today I want to look at three things	announcing the roadmap	the answers arrive in the announced order
The first point is or the second factor is	counting	inside the clause that follows
What is more or on top of that	adding	inside the added clause
However, that said or in fact	reversing or correcting	after the turn, not before it
A case in point is or for instance	giving an example	the example itself often carries the gap
So or as a result	concluding	the result clause
To sum up or what this means is	summarising	a restatement you can still write down

Two habits follow from the table. First, when you hear a contrast or a correction — not X but Y, rather than, instead of — write Y, never X. Second, when the voice signals a summary, stay with it: a restatement is slower and clearer than the sentence that carried the answer the first time.

Three worked extracts with the signpost marked

Each extract below is an original academic-style script written for this page. Read the note line first, decide the class, then check the answer and the phrase that located it.

Extract 1 — a talk on natural dyes:

• Script line: the pigment is not in the leaf but in the small pods that form after flowering
• Note line: Source of the pigment: the ___ (not the leaves)
• Answer: pods — noun, plural.
• Signpost: not in the leaf but in — the answer is the second half of the contrast.

Extract 2 — a talk on urban trees and cooling:

• Script line: the cooling effect depended less on the number of trees than on how much shade they cast over paved surfaces
• Note line: Cooling depended mainly on ___ over paved surfaces
• Answer: shade — noun.
• Signpost: less on ... than on — the comparison settles the answer on the second item.

Extract 3 — a talk on sleep and new skills:

• Script line: what seems to matter most is the timing of practice relative to sleep, however, the advantage disappears when the evening session is followed by a late night
• Note line: Best retention: practice in the ___ , then a normal night
• Answer: evening — noun used as a time word.
• Signpost: what seems to matter most, then however for the condition attached to it.

In all three, the answer is one word taken straight from the recording, and the tempting wrong answer is the longer phrase around it. That is the shape of the task: the talk supplies a sentence, the note line asks for a word.

A twelve-line drill from two original talks

The two scripts below are original, written in an academic register for this page. Read each note line, write the class beside the gap, then fill it. The answer column is for checking afterwards, not for reading first.

Script A (original, kept in English so you can practise on it): the first point to note about coffee is altitude, because above about 1,200 metres the beans ripen more slowly, and slower ripening concentrates the flavour. The second factor is shade: farms that keep a canopy of taller trees report fewer pests, since the birds nesting in those trees eat the beetles that damage the crop. What is less obvious is the timing of the harvest, picking too early lowers the sugar content, and no amount of later processing can correct that

Script B (original, kept in English): turning to museum lighting, the usual advice is to keep levels low, but the damage is not caused by brightness alone. Ultraviolet radiation breaks the chemical bonds in pigments, and it is present even in daylight that looks dim. Filters remove most of it, and heat is a second problem, because a lamp placed too close dries the canvas from behind. The cheapest fix is distance, moving a lamp half a metre further away reduces both risks at once

#	Note line	Answer class	Answer	Signpost in the script
1	Slow ripening above 1,200 metres concentrates the ___	noun	flavour	The first point to note
2	A canopy of taller trees provides ___	noun	shade	The second factor is
3	Birds nesting in the trees eat the ___	noun, plural	beetles	since
4	Picking too early lowers the ___ content	noun	sugar	What is less obvious
5	Later processing cannot ___ an early mistake	verb	correct	and no amount of
6	First factor named in the talk: ___	noun	altitude	The first point to note
7	Damage is not caused by brightness ___	adverb	alone	not ... alone
8	___ radiation breaks bonds in pigments	noun or adjective	Ultraviolet	but the damage
9	Filters remove most of it, and ___ is a second problem	noun	heat	and
10	A lamp placed too close dries the canvas from ___	adverb	behind	because
11	The cheapest fix is ___	noun	distance	The cheapest fix is
12	Moving a lamp half a ___ away reduces both risks	noun	metre	half a metre

Twelve lines, four classes and eleven different signposts: that ratio is not a coincidence. Most Part 4 gaps are nouns inside a clause that a signpost has just announced.

An error table by cause

Marking the drill is more useful than writing it. Count the errors by cause rather than by number, and the next mock gets a much shorter to-do list.

Cause	What it looks like on the sheet	What to change in the next mock
Word class never predicted	a verb where the note line needed a noun	write N, V, ADJ or NUM beside every gap while reading
The place was lost	two or three gaps blank in a row	mark the next note line's first word and jump to it
Over the word limit	the answer contains the, a or a preposition	delete articles and modifiers before transfer
The wrong half of a contrast	the answer is what the speaker rejected	stop at however, actually and not ... but
A form error on a word you heard	a plural missing, a hyphen added, a unit written twice	treat every gap as a spelling decision, not a memory test

How to review Part 4 without re-listening to the whole test

Re-listening to thirty minutes to find four mistakes is the reason most candidates do not review at all. Review by question number instead, and the same job takes twenty minutes.

1. Circle the wrong question numbers. Do not grade the rest of the paper yet.
2. Locate each number in the transcript, then re-listen to about twenty seconds around it — not the whole part.
3. Write three short lines per error: what you heard, what the note line asked for, what you wrote.
4. Send each error to one row of the table above, and this week practise only that row.
5. Redo the same twelve lines the next day. A cause that disappears is a fix; a cause that returns is a habit.

Run this on material you can check — the free official practice tests with published answer keys and transcripts, rather than on recordings with no transcript. Reviewing four errors properly beats another full mock taken in silence.

Two links are worth having open while you work. If your losses are spread across the whole paper rather than concentrated in Part 4, the overall Listening routine is the right starting point. If your errors are already about the shape of the answer — capitals, plurals, hyphens — the fix lives in answer-form errors rather than in listening again.

The test owners describe band 9 as an expert user with a fully operational command of the language, and the published conversion ranges put band 8 at around 35 marks out of 40. Nothing on this page can promise either number, and none of the ielts listening tips for band 9 here is a shortcut. They are the small procedural decisions — read the class, mark the order, follow the signpost, delete on transfer — that stop a clear academic talk from turning into a half-empty sheet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I understand Part 4 but still miss the answers?

Because understanding is measured per sentence and the mark is measured per word. A candidate can follow the argument perfectly and still lose a gap by writing four words where the instruction allows two, by keeping the article that came before the answer, or by moving to the next question one clause too late.

The practical test is to separate the two failures. If your wrong answers are blank, the reading and tracking step needs work: predict the class, mark the order, listen for the signpost. If your wrong answers contain writing, the transfer step needs work: the words were heard and then written in a form the sheet does not accept.

How many words does IELTS Listening note completion allow?

It depends on the instruction printed above that set of questions, so the honest answer is that you must read it every time. Published examples include ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER and NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS, and the same instruction may vary between sets inside one paper.

Two consequences follow. First, check the instruction during the preview seconds, before the audio starts, and note it in the margin. Second, count again at the transfer stage: an answer over the limit is not marked down, it is marked wrong, and the words that push it over are usually an article or a unit the note line already prints.

Does Part 4 always use note completion?

No. The official question-type list groups form, note, table and flow-chart completion as one family, and the published free samples show note completion taken from a Part 1 recording and table completion taken from a Part 4 lecture. A note sheet in Part 4 is common, but it is not guaranteed, and a table works in exactly the same way: read the class, respect the limit, follow the signpost.

That is also why the method on this page is written around the note sheet rather than around Part 4 itself. Everything except the reading step — the class letters, the order marks, the signpost table, the error log — applies to any completion task on the paper.