TOEFL Listen and Repeat: how it works and how to do well

The task opens with a short scenario, read aloud and shown on screen: for example, you’ve started a job somewhere on campus, and a supervisor is showing you what to say to visitors. A picture of the place stays on screen, and as you go through the sentences, the picture moves through its different parts.

You hear one sentence at a time, once, and the sentence isn’t shown. After a short pause, you repeat exactly what was said. You have 8 to 12 seconds to record each answer.

The sentences get longer and more complex as you go. The first is short and simple; the last ones add longer phrases and extra parts, like “who…”, “which…” or “if…”.

It’s the first task in the Speaking section, before Take an Interview. The whole section takes about 8 minutes.

Each sentence gets a score from 0 to 5 on ETS’s scoring guide for this task, so the seven sentences are worth up to 35 points. The guide looks at two things: whether you repeated the sentence exactly, and whether you’re easy to understand.

• 5: an exact repetition that’s easy to understand throughout.
• 4: the meaning is all there, with a small change: a little word like “the” or “to” missing or changed, a similar word swapped in, a wrong tense or plural ending, or two words in the wrong order.
• 3: most of the sentence is there, but the meaning has changed, or some words are hard to make out.
• 2: a large part is missing, or it’s hard to understand.
• 1: only a few words, or mostly hard to understand.
• 0: no answer, no English, or something unrelated.

So say back exactly what you heard: a smooth version in your own words scores lower than the sentence itself.

Try them, then check the places where repetitions most often go wrong:

• Sentence 4: “don’t hand out” easily turns into “don’t give”. It means the same, but it isn’t what you heard.
• Sentence 5: “who pay by card” sits in the middle of the sentence. Keep it there, and keep the “s” on “Shoppers”.
• Sentence 7: the end has two pairs, “the food fresh” and “the prices low”. Keep both, in that order.

1. 1

   Hear the whole sentence first. Don’t start while it’s still playing. Wait for the pause, then say the whole sentence clearly, at a natural pace, in one go.

2. 2

   Remember it in chunks. Hear a long sentence as two or three groups of words: “Shoppers who pay by card / can use the machine / at the information desk”. Chunks are far easier to hold than single words.

3. 3

   Repeat it exactly, small words too. Don’t improve or shorten the sentence. Little words like “the”, “to” and “at”, and endings like -s and -ed, are part of an exact repetition.

4. 4

   Keep going if you slip. If a word comes out wrong, correct it and finish the sentence. A complete sentence with a quick correction keeps the meaning; stopping halfway loses it.