General Introduction to Tactics For Listening
Tactics for Listening is an intensive series on Listening skills in IELTS, divided into 3 books by level from basic to advanced (Basic Tactics for Listening Basic – Developing Tactics for Listening – Expanding Tactics for Listening).
- Basic Tactics for Listening: Listening practice book for beginners or those of basic level (~ Band 1.0+)
- Developing Tactics for Listening: Listening practice book for intermediate level learners (~ Band 3.0 – 3.5)
- Expanding Tactics for Listening: Listening practice book for upper-intermediate and more advanced learners (~ Band 4.0+)
Tactics For Listening also has a variety of exercises for learners to better their listening skills and build up their vocabulary. Regardless of which BAND you are in, this book makes it easy to prepare for the IELTS Listening test.
Detailed Review of Tactics For Listening
Basic Tactics for Listening
This is the first book in the Tactics for Listening series by Jack C. Richards, for beginners or those of very basic level (~Band 1.0+) to practice more to understand basic conversations.
Main content:
- Basic Tactics for Listening consists of 24 units, with each unit divided into 3-5 lessons related to daily life themes
- Each unit consists of Getting Ready – which introduces the topic overview and provides the main keywords, Let’s Listen – which provides practice exercises included in the CD file, Over to you – a review of the entire unit, Vocabulary test with advanced exercises.
- The book comes with 3 CD files and a detailed script to help learners review their listening
Notable features:
- 24 units correspond to 24 major topics commonly encountered in IELTS Listening (Sports, Family, Movies, Weather, Shopping, ..). These topics are highly relevant to learners in daily life and extremely easy to learn for beginners.
- The difficulty of the book is divided by the exercises in each Unit, not based on the order of the Units, so learners can freely choose the topic they like to learn first.
- The type of exercises designed for each unit is very diverse but has a consistent connection, making the process of memorizing vocabulary and listening skills of learners natural and highly practical.
- The illustrations are clear and generally, the exercises are suitable for beginners.
- Listening exercises follow the British – American accent.
Drawbacks:
- Basic Tactics for Listening helps learners familiarize themselves with most types of listening exercises, but the strategy part for each type of exercise requires them to find out on their own through other sources, the book does not teach learners these skills.
- Therefore, although the book is suitable for beginners, those who are not familiar with listening exercises will still face many difficulties when using the book.
For copyright reasons, you can’t download IELTS books directly on our website, but in this file. Please like and recommend our 9IELTS Fanpage to motivate us to keep up the good work.
Developing Tactics for Listening
This is the second book in the series Tactics for Listening by author Jack C. Richards, listening practice for intermediate level students (~ Band 3.0 – 3.5), helping learners develop listening skills according to sentences and paragraphs long and complex.
Main content:
- Developing Tactics for Listening consists of 24 units, with each unit divided into 3-5 lessons related to daily life themes.
- Each unit consists of 2 sections: Getting Ready (1 lesson format) which introduces a topic overview and provides a wordlist by topic, Let’s Listen (4 lesson format) which provides practice exercises included in a CD file.
- The book comes with 24 audio files corresponding to each unit and a detailed script to help learners review their listening.
Notable features:
- 24 units correspond to 24 large topics (City Transportation, The weekend, renting a car, ..) but with a more in-depth and detailed level. These topics are close to the real exam questions, so the phrases/word lists are key vocabulary phrases with high usage.
- The exercise has many long questions and more complex grammar points, forcing learners to improve their listening skills to fill in the correct grammar.
- Developing Tactics for Listening is designed according to practical communication topics with detailed situations and exercises at a more advanced and in-depth level. To do the exercises in the Develop book, learners need to have a solid foundation from the exercises in the Basic Tactics for Listening.
- The illustrations are clear and generally, the exercises are interesting and suitable for learners.
- Listening exercises follow the British – American accent.
Drawbacks:
- Developing Tactics for Listening helps learners familiarize themselves with most types of listening exercises, but the strategy part for each type of exercise requires learners to find out on their own through other sources, the book does not teach them these skills.
- Therefore, although the book is suitable for learners of 3.0 -3.5 level, those who are not familiar with doing listening exercises, and do not have a strategy for dealing with lessons will still face many difficulties when using the book.
For copyright reasons, you can’t download IELTS books directly on our website, but in this file. Please like and recommend our 9IELTS Fanpage to motivate us to keep up the good work.
Expanding Tactics for Listening
This is the last book in the series of Tactics for Listening by author Jack C. Richards, suitable for those with a high level of English 4.0+. More complex topics will help learners get used to hearing and understanding more in-depth conversations, gaining new knowledge of vocabulary and grammar.
Main content:
- Expanding Tactics for Listening consists of 24 units, with each unit divided into 3-5 lessons related to daily life (Successful Businesses, Gadgets and Machines, Character Traits …).
- Each unit consists of 2 sections: Getting Ready (1 type of lesson) which introduces an overview of the topic and provides a wordlist by topic, Let’s Listen (4 types of lessons) which provides practice exercises included in the CD file.
- The listening lessons will be more tricky than those of Basic and Developing Tactics for Listening. Students need to be very careful not to fall into the trap of exercises in the book.
- The book comes with 24 audio files corresponding to each unit and a detailed script to help learners review their listening.
Notable features:
- 24 units correspond to 24 major topics but with monologues, conversations (2-3 people) are longer and carry a lot more information. These topics are close to the real exam questions, so the phrases/word lists are key vocabulary phrases with high usage.
- The exercise has many long questions and more complex grammar points, forcing learners to improve their listening skills to fill it out correctly.
- Detailed exercises at a more advanced level but still close to common topics in IELTS. To do the exercises in the Expanding Tactics for Listening, learners need to have a solid foundation from the exercises in the previous Developing Tactics for Listening.
- The illustrations are clear and generally, the exercises are suitable. The book has some simple topics such as Name, Date, and Time that will only see in the Basic Tactics for Listening but not in the Developing Tactics for Listening.
- There is an audio script file for learners to do listening exercises and practice speaking.
- Listening exercises follow the British – American accent.
Drawbacks:
- Expanding Tactics for Listening helps learners familiarize themselves with most types of listening exercises, but the strategy part for each type of exercise requires them to find out on their own through other sources, the book does not teach them these skills.
- Therefore, although the book is suitable for learners of 4.0+ level, those who are not familiar with doing listening exercises and do not have a strategy to deal with the lessons will still have many difficulties when using the book.
For copyright reasons, you can’t download IELTS books directly on our website, but in this file. Please like and recommend our 9IELTS Fanpage to motivate us to keep up the good work.
How to Use Tactics For Listening Effectively
For those who are just starting out, it is recommended to start with the Listening & Dictation. Initially, you can preview the Tapescript part first, then combine listening and dictation according to the available template. This way will build an extremely solid foundation of listening skills for you
Note the details of new words in the process of listening and refer to the pronunciation of those words, you can look up the dictionary if you do not hear clearly.
Read carefully the new words in the Getting Ready section first, and go through the entire lesson once to see if any new words appear. This will help you a lot during the listening process
Try to listen to the recordings all at once, try to guess the meaning of the words, and then listen again. Finally, check the answers at the end of the book.
Continuously practice, and review the listening lessons after completing 1 turn of the books.