Practise Repeat Sentence for PTE Core. Open a question and work on your response at your own pace.
PTE Academic version of this page3168 questions · PTE Core
Repeat Sentence plays a short sentence once, and you repeat it back exactly, at a natural pace. Treat it as meaning groups rather than a string of separate words — hearing meaning and keeping word order matters more than memorising isolated sounds.
Repeat Sentence looks the same on PTE Core as it does on PTE Academic - the same short recording, played once. What changes is the answer window shown on Pearson's Core page. The skills stay the same: Pearson's Core Score Guide counts the task toward both your Listening and Speaking scores, two of the four numbers IRCC turns into a CLB level.
Repeat Sentence plays a short sentence, between three and nine seconds long, exactly once through your headset. As soon as it finishes, you repeat the sentence back, in the same order, at a natural pace.
A PTE Core test includes ten to twelve Repeat Sentence items, making it one of the more frequent Speaking and Writing tasks.
Because the recording can run anywhere from three to nine seconds, some sentences are short and simple while others carry more clauses and vocabulary, so expect the difficulty to vary from one item to the next.
Pearson's PTE Core test-format page shows a 40-second figure inside a tile labelled "Prompt length", which reads like a mislabelling rather than a separately documented answer time; treat 40 seconds as the practical answer window rather than a fully confirmed number. Either way, a sentence that lasted three to nine seconds takes far less time than that to repeat, so the window itself is rarely the limiting factor - your memory of the sentence is.
| Detail | PTE Core |
|---|---|
| Items per test | 10-12 |
| Recording length | 3-9 seconds, plays once |
| Preparation time | None - the microphone opens right after a short tone |
| Answer window | Shown as 40 seconds on Pearson's Core format page |
Repeat Sentence is marked on three traits: Content, Pronunciation and Fluency. Content is scored out of 3 - 3 points if every word is in the correct sequence, 2 points if at least half the words are in the correct sequence, 1 point if fewer than half are, and 0 for almost nothing recognisable.
Pronunciation and Fluency are each marked 0 to 5 against Pearson's standard proficiency bands. Repeat Sentence also feeds your Listening score, since the task starts with something you have to understand correctly before you can reproduce it.
There is no credit for staying silent or for saying something unrelated to the sentence you heard.
Because Repeat Sentence draws on Listening as well as Speaking, it is one of the higher-frequency tasks that can move both scores toward an IRCC threshold. Pearson's PTE Core to CLB tables put Canadian Language Benchmark 7, the level several Express Entry programmes require, at 60 or higher in Listening and 68 or higher in Speaking.
With no preparation time, everything happens while the recording plays and in the second after it ends. This is the routine we suggest.
Example (written by LexiPTE) - Repeat Sentence audio: "The committee will review the proposal again before making a final decision."
A strong response repeats the sentence exactly, in the same word order, at a steady pace. A response that reorders it - for example, saying "decision" before "proposal" - keeps some Content credit for correct words but loses points for sequence.
A partial response, such as "The committee will review the proposal before making a decision" (dropping "again" and "final"), still earns Content credit for the words it gets right, in the right order, rather than scoring zero.
Repeat Sentence is mostly a memory task under time pressure, so the useful habits are the ones that make holding a sentence in your head easier.
Drill Repeat Sentence in short, frequent sessions rather than one long one - in our experience short-term recall improves faster with spaced practice. Alternate between sentences you have heard before and new ones, and record your answers so you can check word order against the original afterwards.
Because Repeat Sentence also feeds your Listening score, note whether a mistake came from mishearing a word or from forgetting a word you heard correctly - the two problems need different practice.
