IELTS Listening form, note and table completion: how to fill every gap

Completion questions look easy. The gap is on the page, the answer is in the recording, and you only have to write it down. Yet this is the question family where candidates most often lose a mark they actually heard: the word was spelt wrongly, it ran one word over the limit, or it was a plural without its ending.

This guide covers form, note, table, flow-chart and summary completion, and sentence completion. It sits inside the wider map of the test in the IELTS Listening test format and question types.

What these questions are

IELTS.org’s Listening format page names the family as form, note, table, flow-chart and summary completion, and lists sentence completion as a separate type. In all of them you fill a gap, and IELTS.org states that a word limit is given, for example “NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER”. The layouts differ.

• Form and note completion gives you a form or a set of notes with gaps, such as a name, an address or a time.
• Table completion gives you a grid where each row is an item and each column a detail, with some cells empty.
• Flow-chart completion gives you the steps of a process in order, with gaps.
• Summary completion gives you a short paragraph with gaps.
• Sentence completion gives you sentences that stop where the missing information goes.

IELTS publishes no rule about which part of the test carries which type, or how often each appears. Form and note gaps tend to suit an everyday conversation, and table and flow-chart gaps suit an academic talk, but that is a habit of past material, not a rule of the exam.

Predict the kind of word

IDP’s guide to common mistakes tells you to read the questions first and to check what kind of answer each one wants. This is the core skill, and it takes only a few seconds per gap. Look at the words around the gap and ask what has to go there.

• After “Surname:” the gap needs a name, probably spelled out.
• After “Phone number:” it needs digits.
• After “Start date:” it needs a date, and the question may show a month or a day already.
• In “a ___ room” it needs an adjective or a noun that can describe a room.
• In “Room number: ___” it needs a number, possibly with a letter.

Predicting removes a lot of noise. If you know the gap needs a number, the names and places around it stop competing for your attention.

Worked example

Here is an invented extract, written for this guide and not from any past paper. The question sheet reads:

Holiday cottage enquiry. Name: Mr ____. Booking for: ____ nights. Extra needed: ____ (one word only).

The recording runs:

“Good morning. Can I take a name? It’s Faulkner, that’s F-A-U-L-K-N-E-R. And the booking is for six nights… actually, sorry, seven, we’ve decided to stay the weekend as well. And the cottage has a garden? Good, we’d like a cot, for the baby, yes just a cot.”

What is wanted, and what catches people:

1. Name. Faulkner, spelled out. The letters must all be right.
2. Nights. Seven. The speaker first says six and then corrects herself. The earlier number is a distractor, and the second is the answer.
3. Extra needed. Cot, one word only. “A cot” breaks the limit, and “cot for the baby” breaks it worse.

The exercise is not difficult English. It is a test of whether you kept listening after the first number, and whether you followed the instruction on the page.

The word limit

IELTS.org states that you lose the mark for writing more than the word limit, and that hyphenated words such as “check-in” count as single words. IDP’s example is worth learning: if the instruction says ONE word and you write “the bus”, the answer will be marked as incorrect, even though “bus” is the right word. So do not copy an article, a preposition or an adjective from the recording unless the gap needs it. Read the limit on every set of questions, because it can change from one set to the next.

A number counts when the instruction says “and/or a number”. If the limit is “ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER”, an answer such as “blue 7” fits and “light blue 7” does not.

Spelling

IDP states that correct spelling is essential in the Listening test, and that if the spelling is incorrect the answer will be marked as wrong. It gives examples of words that are often misspelt, including library, environment, street, avenue and professor. Everyday nouns and place words, months and days of the week are the words that appear often in the test, so they deserve a minute of your practice.

IELTS.org and IDP publish no list of accepted alternative spellings. So if you are unsure between two spellings, choose the one you would use in a formal letter. Write each answer with the same care you would give a line in an exam essay.

Names spelled out letter by letter

In everyday conversations, the speaker often spells a name, as Faulkner was spelled above. Two habits help.

First, know the alphabet by sound in English. Letters such as A, E and I, and G and J, are easy to confuse when you listen quickly. Practise writing letters as a voice says them, not just recognising them.

Second, write the letters as you hear them and do not try to understand the name as a word. A name you have never met cannot be guessed; it can only be copied. If the speaker pauses or repeats a letter, write the letter again only if it was actually repeated.

Numbers, dates and codes

A booking or enquiry dialogue may well include a phone number, a date or a reference code, and you must write exactly what was said. Some places to be careful:

• Phone numbers are read digit by digit, and a speaker may say “double” before a repeated digit.
• Dates can be spoken as “the fourteenth of March” and written as 14 March. Write the form the gap shows if it shows one.
• Amounts and measurements may include a decimal, so listen for the small number after the big one.
• Similar sounds such as thirteen and thirty differ by stress: the stress falls on the last part of thirteen and on the first part of thirty.

If the gap already shows a unit, do not write it again.

Plurals and endings

An ending is easy to drop when you write fast. If the sentence reads “students must bring two ____“, the gap needs a plural noun, and a singular form does not fit. IELTS.org and IDP publish nothing on how a singular or plural answer is judged, so the safest approach is to listen for the ending and to check that your answer fits the grammar around the gap. Read the finished sentence to yourself once your answer is written.

Keep your place

IELTS.org states that answers come in the same order as the information in the recording. In a form or a table you can use that to keep your place: read down the column while the speaker moves down the information. If you miss one gap, do not chase it. The next gap is already being spoken about, and one lost mark is better than two. What to do after a slip is part of the common mistakes and traps in IELTS Listening.

Check what kind of mistake you made

When you review a practice test, sort each lost completion mark into one of four causes: you did not hear it, you heard it but misspelt it, you broke the word limit, or you chose the earlier, corrected answer. Each has a different remedy. Missing it is a listening problem; the other three are habits, and habits are the quickest marks to win back. How to improve your IELTS Listening score makes the same point about marks that were never about listening.

Listening is marked out of 40, and IELTS.org lists about 23 marks for band 6 and about 30 for band 7. The gap between the two is seven questions, and a handful of completion gaps lost to spelling and limits can be most of that gap. For the other question types, see multiple choice and matching questions and map, plan and diagram labelling, and use the band score calculator to see what a few extra marks do to your section band.