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Map and Plan Labelling in IELTS Listening: Direction Language

IELTS Listening29 August 2026 · 8 min read · WiderAI Team

Map and plan labelling asks you to place five or so names onto a drawing — a park, a campus, a shopping centre, a building floor plan — while one speaker walks an audience through it. It appears most often in Part 2 of IELTS Listening, and it is won or lost on two things: whether you know the small set of direction and position phrases English uses for describing space, and whether you spent the pause before the audio orienting yourself on the map.

Candidates fear this task more than it deserves, because it feels visual rather than linguistic. In fact it is the most predictable task in the Listening test. The vocabulary is a closed set — opposite, next to, beyond, at the far end, as you come in, just past — and the speaker almost always moves through the space in a logical route, describing locations relative to landmarks that are already printed on your map. Learn the phrases, use the preparation time properly, and the task becomes mechanical.

One rule frames everything else: the answers come from the labelled landmarks, not from thin air. Every unlabelled gap on the map will be described in relation to something you can already see — the entrance, the café, the main path, the lake. Your job during the pause is to learn that fixed geography so well that when the speaker says "directly opposite the café", your eye jumps there without searching.

What does a map labelling task look like?

You get a drawing with some features already named and five to seven blank locations marked with letters or gaps, plus a list of questions. Two variants exist:

• Letter-matching: the map shows locations A–H, and you match each question (e.g. "14. First aid room") to the correct letter. There are usually more letters than questions, so some locations are never used.
• Write-the-word: the gaps are numbered on the map itself and you write the name you hear, respecting the word limit. Here spelling counts, exactly as in completion tasks.

The recording is typically a single speaker — a guide, a manager, an organiser — introducing the place to visitors or new staff. Crucially, the questions follow the order of the recording, and the speaker tends to follow a route: starting at the entrance and moving through the space, or working around the plan systematically. If you lose one answer, the route logic tells you where the description has moved to, so re-anchor on the next question rather than hunting backwards.

Compass points appear in some maps: if you see a compass rose or a North arrow printed, expect in the north-east corner, on the southern side, just west of the lake. If there is no compass, the language will be left/right/top/bottom relative to a viewpoint instead — which is exactly why the pause matters.

Which direction phrases decide the answers?

The language of map tasks is a finite list. Learn it as vocabulary, the way you would learn topic words, and drill it until each phrase produces an instant movement of your eye.

Position relative to a landmark

• opposite / directly opposite / across from — facing it, usually with a path or road between
• next to / beside / adjacent to — touching or immediately alongside
• in front of / behind — nearer to you or hidden beyond it
• between the X and the Y — flanked by both
• in the corner / at the junction / where the paths meet
• on the corner of — at the meeting point of two roads (for street maps)

Movement along a route

• go through the entrance / as you come in / as you enter — establishes the starting viewpoint
• walk along / go straight ahead / follow the path — continue in the current direction
• turn left / turn right / take the first turning on your left
• just past the café / beyond the lake / after the bridge — slightly further along than the landmark
• just before you reach — slightly nearer than the landmark
• at the far end / at the end of the corridor / at the top of the map — the extreme point
• halfway along / in the middle of — the midpoint

The viewpoint trap

On your left is not a fixed place — it depends on which way the imagined walker is facing, and after every turn, left and right rotate with the walker. This single confusion produces more wrong answers than all other map errors combined. The fix is physical: move your pen tip along the route as the speaker walks it, and rotate your mental facing at every turn.

How should you use the preparation time?

The pause before the section is where the task is actually won. A reliable thirty-second routine:

1. Find the entrance or starting point. Tours nearly always begin there, and left/right language will assume it. Mark it.
2. Read the printed labels aloud in your head. The speaker will navigate by these landmarks; you need to recognise them instantly by ear, including in slightly different wording (the refreshment area for a café marked Café).
3. Note the compass or the axes. Compass present: label the edges. No compass: fix "top/bottom/left/right" in your mind as the reference frame.
4. Scan the blank locations and their neighbours. For location C, notice now that it sits between the pond and the car park — so when either is mentioned, C may be in play.
5. Read the list of things to be placed. Knowing you are listening for a first aid room and a picnic area primes you to catch those words in paraphrase.

Candidates who skip this routine are forced to do geography and listening simultaneously, and the single play does not allow it. Candidates who do it are simply confirming, letter by letter, a map they already understand.

Why do prepared candidates still lose marks here?

• Distractors with corrections. Speakers routinely mention a wrong option first: "The first aid room used to be beside the main office, but it's now at the far end of the west corridor." The answer is the corrected version. Keep listening one beat past the first plausible location.
• Several landmarks in one sentence. "Just past the fountain, opposite the rose garden" — two references, one answer. Both must fit; if only one fits a letter, you have the wrong letter.
• Letters that are never used. In letter-matching, unused options exist specifically so that "it's near the lake" fits two letters. The second reference in the sentence exists to split them — catch it.
• Losing the route. If you miss a turn, do not reconstruct; jump forward. The next question's answer will be described from wherever the tour now is, and question order will carry you there.
• Spelling on write-in maps. If you must write reception or greenhouse, the usual completion rules apply: wrong spelling scores nothing.

To practise, work with the transcript after each attempt: trace the described route on the map with the text in front of you and find the exact sentence that placed each answer. Then re-listen without the transcript and follow with your pen. Three or four maps trained this way teach the whole direction lexicon, because the same phrases recur test after test. Alongside official materials from ielts.org, you will find guides to the other Listening question types on the WiderAI blog.

A last reframe: map labelling is the one Listening task where the test physically shows you the answer space. The landmarks, the options and the geometry are all printed before the audio begins; the recording only tells you how they connect. Prepare accordingly.