Mastering OET Listening: Structure, Challenges, and Proven Strategies

OET Listening can feel overwhelming, especially with unfamiliar accents and fast medical conversations.

This guide breaks down each part of the test and shows you how to train effectively using real OET-style methods like dictation and shadowing.

🩺 Overview of the Listening Test

Let’s begin with an overview of the OET Listening sub-test.

Parts: 3 (Part A, Part B, Part C)
Total Questions: 42
Duration: Approximately 40 minutes

The OET Listening test is divided into three parts — A, B, and C — with a total of 42 questions.

The topics cover general healthcare communication, not limited to any single medical specialty.
The total test time, including answer transfer, is around 40 minutes.

Part A: Consultation

Topic: Counselling
Recording Length: About 5 minutes each
Number of Questions: 24

Part A assesses your ability to extract specific information.

You’ll hear two different recordings of a doctor–patient consultation and complete the doctor’s notes based on what you hear.

There are 24 questions in total, and scoring around 18 or more correct answers is key to achieving a score of 350 (Grade B).

Part B: Workplace Conversations

Topic: Short dialogues in a medical setting
Recording Length: About 1 minute each
Number of Questions: 6

Part B tests your ability to understand the gist and main points of brief professional interactions.

You’ll listen to six short recordings that typically feature briefings, handovers, or clinical discussions.

Each question presents multiple-choice options, and you must select the most accurate answer based on what you hear.

Part C: Presentations and Interviews

Topic: Healthcare presentations or interviews
Recording Length: About 5 minutes each
Number of Questions: 12

Part C focuses on your ability to understand longer, complex medical discussions.

You’ll hear two extended recordings — usually a presentation or interview.

The task evaluates whether you can follow the speaker’s ideas and arguments throughout.

Each recording is followed by six multiple-choice questions.

🎧 How to Prepare for OET Listening

Why It Feels Difficult

Before exploring specific techniques, let’s consider why OET Listening feels challenging for many IMGs.

When we struggle with listening, it usually comes down to two causes:

Lexical comprehension — not knowing the meaning of the words.
Phonetic comprehension — not recognizing the sounds we hear.

In OET, several factors make listening difficult:

Frequent variations in speech
Fast-paced recordings
Tricky, similar-sounding options
Use of colloquial or idiomatic expressions
The need to listen and write simultaneously
Exposure to various English accents (UK, Australian, Irish, etc.)

Unlike other English tests that use scripted, textbook-style audio, OET uses authentic, realistic clinical speech.
That’s why the audio often feels harder to follow — but also why it’s more useful in real clinical practice.

If you can understand OET recordings, you’ll be able to communicate effectively in real hospital environments.
Even if you were trained in American English, once you master clear sound recognition, you’ll be able to understand different accents naturally.

Setting a Goal

The fundamental goal of OET Listening practice is simple: Be able to understand one sentence at a time.

To achieve this, you must tackle listening comprehension from two angles:

Meaning (through reading and vocabulary work)
Sound recognition (through listening drills)

To build sound recognition, follow these three steps:

Identify which sounds you can’t catch.
Train your ear to recognize those sounds.
Memorize them through repetition.

This process is best achieved through dictation training, the single most effective method for OET Listening improvement.

Dictation Practice

Dictation means listening to audio and writing down what you hear.

If you can write a sound correctly, that means you truly heard it.

Dictation helps you meet all three sound-recognition goals:

Identify what you can’t hear
→ (You’ll notice gaps where you can’t write.)
Recognize those sounds through repetition
→ (Rewriting trains your brain to catch subtle differences.)
Memorize those patterns
→ (Writing full sentences helps you store them long-term.)

Step-by-step Dictation Method

Play one sentence from the recording and pause.
Write it down. (At first, you may catch only a few words — that’s fine.)
Continue this process for the entire recording.
Repeat the same audio at least three times.
On later rounds, revise and correct your first attempt.
Finally, compare your transcript with the official script, analyzing why you missed certain parts.
Replay those difficult segments repeatedly until you can hear them clearly.

This deliberate process is where real listening progress happens.

Mimicking the Audio

To make dictation even more effective, imitate the recording afterward.
The closer your imitation is, the easier it becomes to understand the same sound patterns later.

There are three main imitation methods:

Reading aloud (easiest)
Overlapping — reading while listening with the script
Shadowing — speaking along without the script (hardest)

Start with reading aloud, then move to overlapping and finally shadowing.
Shadowing is challenging, but it gives the deepest listening–speaking connection.
If you can shadow accurately, you’ll almost certainly be able to understand that recording fully — and score perfectly on it.

Listen Repeatedly

Once you’ve completed dictation and imitation, keep re-listening during your free time — especially while commuting.

Listening improvement is a matter of exposure and volume.

Avoid looking at the script while listening. If you find a part you can’t catch, then refer to the script, identify the issue, and practice that segment again.

If you struggle even after dictation and shadowing, it’s a sign your review accuracy needs improvement — not just your ear.

What to Avoid

One of the most common mistakes is solving too many practice questions without reflection.
Doing dozens of tests won’t improve your listening unless you analyze your errors.

At OET Bank, we’ve seen many learners who answered hundreds of questions but saw no score improvement — because they weren’t targeting their listening gaps.
Practice questions are useful only for format familiarization, not comprehension training.

If you already have strong listening skills, practice tests will help you adapt to question types.
But if not, your time is far better spent on dictation and sound training.

In short:
Use questions only to confirm progress — not as your main training method.
Save full mock tests for the final stage before the exam to get used to timing and format.

🩹 In Summary

Let’s recap the key points:

Part A is the most crucial section for achieving a high score.
Dictation is the most effective listening practice.
Imitating the audio helps solidify recognition.

If your goal is 350 (Grade B), focus on Part A — once you can hear the words, you can get them right.

For higher scores (around 400), especially if you’re aiming for clinical training in the UK or similar pathways, you’ll also need to master Parts B and C.

If you’re preparing for OET, consider exploring our practice resources at OET Bank.

We’re designed not just as mock tests, but as powerful review tools that make it easier to analyze weaknesses and focus on what’s needed to pass.

Explore professional learning materials and courses:

👉 https://oet-bank.com/shop

Listening, OET Strategies