IELTS Listening map and plan labelling
Map labelling gives you a plan — a building, a campus, a park, a floor — with places to label, and a speaker who walks you through it. It is the most visual task on the paper and the one where the listening itself is usually easy. Almost all the difficulty is orientation.
The language is small and closed: on your left, opposite, straight ahead, behind, next to, at the far end, as you come in. There are perhaps twenty phrases and they recur across every version of the task. What varies is where you are standing.
That is the whole trap. "On your left" depends on which way the speaker has you facing, and a plan does not face anywhere. Candidates who fix their entry point and direction before the audio starts rarely lose a mark here; candidates who do not can lose every one of them while understanding every word.
What it looks like on the paper
A plan or map with labelled boxes or lettered positions, and a short monologue or conversation giving directions in the order the gaps are numbered.
Where it appears
Part 2, nearly always, where one person is describing a place. It appears on a minority of papers, so many candidates meet it for the first time in the real test — which is precisely why it is worth ten minutes of preparation.
Try one
Try one — no sign-up
You come in from the bottom of the plan. What is opposite the café?
Where the marks actually go
Mixing up left and right
The directions are relative to the speaker's route, not to the page. Once you lose which way you are facing, every answer after it goes too.
What to do: Find the entrance and mark the direction of travel with an arrow before the audio starts.
Front and back of the plan
"Straight back" and "behind" move you away from the entrance, which may be any edge of the page.
What to do: Label the entrance edge "me" and read every instruction from there.
A landmark used as a pivot
The speaker often stops describing from the entrance and starts describing from a place already labelled: "from the café, turn right".
What to do: Move your finger to the new pivot when you hear its name. Keeping your finger on the plan is the single most effective habit in this task.
The method, in order
- 1Before the audio: find the entrance, mark the direction of travel, and read the labels already printed.
- 2Say the closed set of direction words to yourself — left, right, opposite, behind, far end — so none of them surprises you.
- 3Keep a finger or pencil tip at your current position and move it as the speaker moves.
- 4Write the answer the moment a place is named; do not wait to be sure.
- 5If you lose your place, rejoin at the next named landmark rather than trying to retrace.
How to practise this one on purpose
Spend ten minutes learning the closed set of direction words — on your left, opposite, behind, straight ahead, at the far end, as you come in — because the same twenty phrases carry every version of this task. Then practise with a finger on the plan, moving it as the speaker moves.
Common questions
Is the plan drawn to scale?
Not reliably, and it does not matter. Nothing in the task depends on distance — only on relative position and the order you reach things.
What if I have never seen this kind of building?
You do not need to recognise it. Every answer is in the directions, and the vocabulary of the places is given on the page.
Is this the type costing you marks?
The free listening check is six short clips and three minutes. It gives you an indicative band and, more usefully, which listening skills the misses cluster in — so the next month of practice goes somewhere.
Take the free listening test →The other question types
Lisenia is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the British Council, IDP or Cambridge Assessment English. Band figures here are indicative practice guidance, not official scores.