TOEFL Listen and Repeat: how to repeat longer sentences accurately

Listen and Repeat is the first part of the new Speaking section. It sounds easy until the sentences reach 15 or 20 words. Then it becomes a real test of how well you process English at natural speed.

How it works

• You see a short context, for example "You are attending an orientation session at a student accommodation office."
• You hear a sentence once, spoken by a staff member, a guide or a lecturer.
• You repeat it. You have a short window to answer, around 8–12 seconds depending on the sentence.
• There are seven sentences. The early ones are short; the later ones are longer and grammatically more complex.

What it measures

Repeating accurately depends on understanding. You can repeat "The library closes at nine" by memory alone. You can't repeat "Students who borrowed laptops before the holiday should return them to the front desk by Friday afternoon" unless you understood it, because your memory holds meaning, not sounds.

So this task checks:

• Listening accuracy at natural speed.
• Grammar: your brain rebuilds the sentence using grammar you know.
• Pronunciation and rhythm.

How it's scored

Raters and automated scoring compare what you said with the original sentence. Missing words, changed words and unclear pronunciation reduce the score. Small slips matter less than missing whole phrases. Our practice tests estimate this by comparing a transcript of your answer with the original sentence word by word.

Techniques that work

1. Listen in chunks. "Students who borrowed laptops / before the holiday / should return them / to the front desk / by Friday afternoon." Five chunks are easier to hold than twenty words.
2. Start speaking promptly. The longer you wait, the more you forget.
3. Copy the rhythm and stress. If you get the rhythm right, the words tend to follow.
4. If you lose a word, keep going. A complete sentence with one word changed scores better than stopping halfway.
5. Don't "improve" the sentence. Say exactly what you heard, even if you would phrase it differently.

Practice: shadowing

Shadowing is the most effective practice for this task.

1. Take a short audio clip with a transcript: a podcast, a university video, an audiobook.
2. Play one sentence, pause, and repeat it.
3. Then play it again and speak along with it, half a second behind.
4. Record yourself and compare with the original.

Ten minutes a day for a few weeks makes a noticeable difference, and it helps Listening and Pronunciation at the same time.

Common mistakes

• Dropping small words: articles, prepositions and auxiliaries ("should", "have been").
• Changing word endings: "borrow" for "borrowed", "laptop" for "laptops".
• Paraphrasing instead of repeating.
• Speaking too quietly or too far from the microphone.

In the AIL practice tests

Each AIL TOEFL iBT style practice test includes Listen and Repeat with sentences in a campus setting that get progressively longer. Your recording is transcribed and compared with the original, so you can see exactly which words you dropped or changed.