The PTE Listening Write from Dictation is one of the less complex PTE tasks. With practice and adopting the best strategies for you, high scores are easily achievable. It is an important task, contributing to your Listening and Writing scores.
In this blog, we’ll discuss exactly what is involved in the task, suggest some strategies and look at some practice questions together. The best way to follow this blog is to have the video below open on the side so you can have visual examples of the questions and how to approach them.
PTE Listening Write from Dictation structure
On test day, you will be asked to complete either or four write from dictation tasks. For each task, you will hear a sentence; after that, you’ll need to type the sentence exactly as you heard it into the box on the screen. Each sentence will be three to five seconds long and contain between eight and twelve words.
In many ways, this is the most straightforward of all the PTE test tasks. The more times you practise the Write from Dictation task, the easier it will become, and you’ll start developing your own rhythm.
PTE Listening Write from Dictation strategies for success
Several strategies can help test candidates achieve a high score in PTE Listening Write from Dictation. You might find that one of these strategies works particularly well for you, or you may prefer using a combination. Three common strategies are echoing, chunking and focusing on content words.
Echoing
Repeat the sentence in your head as soon as you hear it. Echoing a sentence keeps it alive in your head while you write it down. A spoken sentence is like a musical tune. Repeating the melody of the sentence helps you to remember all the words.
Many people find that they can concentrate better on hearing and remembering the dictation sentence if they close their eyes while they listen and repeat the sentence in their head.
We encourage you to experiment what works best for you.
Chunking
Remember chunks, not words. An eight to twelve-word sentence can generally be split into three chunks. A chunk is a group of words that belong together in forming the sense of a sentence. It is much easier to remember three chunks than twelve words.
Let’s look at an example sentence and break it into chunks. Here is a sentence example:
Nutritionists recommend drinking at least two litres of water every day.
We can break it into three units of meaning, three chunks.:
Nutritionists recommend drinking
at least two litres
of water every day.
It is much easier to remember a sentence if we split it into parts this way. Let’s try another one:
Most airlines require that international passengers check in three hours before departure.
That is quite a mouthful and a lot of information to remember as one unit. Let’s break it down into three manageable chunks.
Most airlines require that
international passengers check in
three hours before departure.
Chunking makes remembering the sentence easier. Let’s consider how we get that information from our memory into the box on the computer screen.
Many of our students have shared that it helps to write down the sentence on a piece of paper while listening and then use those rough notes as a guide to type the sentence into the box on the screen. Others prefer to concentrate on using their memory of the sound of the dictated sentence. You might work best with a combination of both.
Content Words
Another strategy is to focus on the content words, the words that carry most of the meaning in a sentence, the nouns, verbs and adjectives.
Have a look at this sentence:
Keep an eye on the clock so you don’t run out of time.
Which words carry the content of the sentence, the important meaning?
The content words are Keep, eye, clock, don’t run and time.
The other seven words ( an, on, the, so, you, out and of ) have little meaning. We need them to form a grammatically correct sentence, but we don’t need them to convey the essential meaning of the sentence. We can focus on remembering the important content words and then add functional grammar words to recreate our sentences.
By focusing on and remembering these content words when you listen, you’ll be able to convey the essential meaning of the sentence when you write it down. The function words such as articles and prepositions can be added later when you check the dictation sentence for correct grammar.
Proofreading
Whether you use echoing, chunking, focusing on content words or a combination of these strategies, there is another crucial procedure to follow before moving on to the next task. That’s checking for spelling, grammar and punctuation. Make sure to begin the sentence with a capital letter and end the sentence with a full stop or question mark.
Read the sentence and ensure no words are missing or in the wrong place. You will hear mistakes that your eye might skip over.
PTE Listening Write from Dictation Practice
Click the button and listen to the sentences below. Focus. If it helps you, close your eyes and repeat the sentence in your head. Break the sentence into chunks. Focus on the content words. Type each chunk as you recall it, and finally, check spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Let’s go! Here’s your first sentence. On test day, you will have five seconds to write down the answer after you hear the audio.
How did you go? Did you repeat the sentence in your head? Did you break the sentence into chunks?
You will find that these steps become second nature, and practice will help you become more confident with this task. Let’s try a few more.
The sentences are written at the bottom of the page. Do all five practice dictation sentences by clicking on each audio file. When you have finished, scroll down to the bottom of the page to check your answers.
Getting better? Remembering more of the sentence each time? Good. Let’s keep practising. Number three.
Okay. Let’s do another one. Concentrate, repeat the sentence in your head and remember chunks of language. Here we go.
The more times you do it, the easier it gets. Let’s do one more. Here we go.
You get credit for every correct word, so don’t be too concerned if you got one word slightly wrong. You can still achieve a high score.
PTE Listening Write from Diction Practice answers
Here are the answers from the practice PTE Listening Write from Dictation audio files.
1) All vehicles parked on the university campus require a valid parking permit.
2) Many governments offer incentives to encourage the use of electric vehicles.
3) Competitors are required to report to the registration desk in the hotel lobby.
4) Cash is becoming less common as contactless payment methods become more widespread.
5) Climate change has meant more frequent severe weather often affecting transport routes.
Keen for more PTE Listening Write from Dictation practice?
We also have a video with the full breakdown of the test
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