Short answer: Listening topics are not worth forecasting, and here is the useful reason why — each part has a fixed job, and the contexts inside it barely change.
Part 1 is a transactional conversation, Part 2 a monologue about a local facility or event, Part 3 a discussion between students, Part 4 a lecture.
Knowing the shape is worth more than any topic list, and unlike a topic list it never goes out of date.
Why a Listening "forecast" is the weakest kind
We publish this page with a caveat the others do not need.
Candidate recall works well for a cue card and reasonably for a Task 2 theme; for Listening it produces very little.
A recording is heard once, under pressure, while you are writing — people remember that Part 2 was "about a museum", which does not help you, because Part 2 is always about something like a museum.
What actually transfers is structural, so that is what this page gives you.
As with every forecast here: reports are self-selected and vary by market, and this is a rehearsal list, not a prediction.
The four parts and their recurring contexts
| Part | Format | Contexts that recur |
|---|---|---|
| Part 1 | Two speakers, everyday transaction | Booking accommodation, joining a gym or club, hiring equipment, enquiring about a course, reporting a lost item, ordering a service |
| Part 2 | One speaker, monologue on a local matter | A tour of a facility, a museum or centre, arrangements for an event, changes to a service, a volunteering briefing |
| Part 3 | Two to four speakers, academic discussion | Students planning an assignment or project, a tutorial on methodology, choosing between options, reviewing a field trip |
| Part 4 | One speaker, university lecture | A single academic subject developed in sequence — history, biology, urban planning, business, environment |
Read down the "contexts" column and the pattern is that Parts 1 and 2 are practical life and Parts 3 and 4 are academic life.
The difficulty climbs across the paper, and so does the density of the language, but the jobs stay fixed.
The three shifts reported through 2026
Part 3 and Part 4 delivery is slightly faster. Candidates through the 2026 cycle report a small increase in speed in the back half of the paper.
Practically, this is an argument against note-taking in full words: train yourself to write the answer as you hear it, in abbreviations you can read back, because a slower speaker forgave a slower pen and a faster one does not.
More map and plan labelling in Part 2. Map questions are appearing more often, and they are the type most candidates have practised least.
They fail on orientation rather than vocabulary — you must fix "you are here" and the direction you are facing before the recording starts, or every left and right afterwards is a coin toss.
Our map labelling guide drills exactly that.
A wider spread of accents, with more from the Southern Hemisphere. IELTS has always used British, Australian, New Zealand, North American and other accents, and reports suggest Australian and New Zealand voices are appearing more often.
This is a listening-diet problem, not a technique problem: if every recording you have practised on was British, spend a week on Australian and New Zealand news podcasts, and read our guide to the accents IELTS uses.
Vowels are where the difference lands, and it stops being distracting within a few hours of exposure.
The traps that cost more marks than any topic
Every one of these is worth more to you than knowing what Part 2 will be about.
Spelling and numbers. A correctly heard answer spelled wrongly is wrong.
Dates, prices, phone numbers, postcodes and names spelled out letter by letter account for a large share of lost Part 1 marks, and they are entirely trainable — see our spelling and numbers guide.
Word limits. "No more than two words" means an answer of three words scores zero however right it is. Read the instruction before the recording, not after.
The correction. Speakers change their minds — "it's on Tuesday, sorry, no, Wednesday" — and the first answer is bait (our distractors guide has the rest of them).
This is the single most common Part 1 and Part 3 trap.
The recording plays once. There is no replay, so a lost answer must be abandoned immediately.
Candidates who chase a missed answer lose the next two as well, and that is how a band 7 listener scores 6.
How to prepare in the time you have
Sit whole papers, not exercises. The skill Listening tests is sustained attention across 30 minutes with no second chance, and it does not appear in ten-question drills.
Our Listening practice runs the real one-play rule with instant scoring, and the guided test library has full papers with transcripts, so after marking you can find the exact sentence you misheard rather than guessing.
When this page changes
Rarely, and that is a feature. The four-part structure is fixed by the test design, so this page ages far better than a Speaking topic list.
We review it each quarter with the other forecasts and update it when reported delivery or question-type trends actually shift.