Practise Repeat Sentence for PTE Academic. Open a question and work on your response at your own pace.
PTE Core version of this page3168 questions · PTE Academic
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 plays a short sentence once, and you repeat it back exactly, at a natural pace. Each answer window is only 15 seconds, but with 10 to 12 items it has more items than any other speaking task, so consistent performance across many short attempts matters more than any single strong answer.
A recorded sentence plays once through your headset. As soon as it finishes, the microphone opens and you repeat the sentence back, word for word, at a natural speaking pace.
PTE Academic includes 10 to 12 Repeat Sentence items, more than any other speaking task, and Pearson's Academic Score Guide counts the task towards both Listening and Speaking. With that many items, one weak attempt is not the end of the task: treat each new sentence as a fresh start rather than dwelling on the last one.
You are asked to repeat the sentence, not to explain or evaluate it, so the challenge is capturing and reproducing what you hear rather than knowing about the topic. In our view that makes it one of the more level-playing-field tasks in the test: a candidate with strong short-term auditory memory can do well here regardless of academic background.
The audio is short — between 3 and 9 seconds — and plays once only. There is no preparation time: the microphone opens immediately after the recording ends, marked by a short tone, and you have 15 seconds to answer.
Repeat Sentence reports to both Listening and Speaking, and is scored on three traits: Content, Pronunciation and Oral Fluency. Content is scored out of 3, based on how much of the sentence you reproduce in the correct sequence — full credit requires all the words in the right order, with lower bands for partial matches.
Pronunciation and Oral Fluency each use the same 0-5 bands as other speaking tasks, from 'Non-English' (Pronunciation) and 'Disfluent' (Oral Fluency) at the bottom to 'Highly proficient' at the top. Pearson gives no credit at all for no response or for a response that does not relate to the sentence played.
Because three separate traits are in play, two candidates can say almost the same words and still receive different scores: one who reproduces most of the sentence smoothly and clearly may outscore one who reproduces slightly more of the wording but with hesitant, choppy delivery, because delivery is judged on its own traits as well as on Content.
| Band | What it requires |
|---|---|
| 3 | All words reproduced in the correct sequence |
| 2 | 50% or more of the words in the correct sequence |
| 1 | Fewer than 50% of the words in the correct sequence |
| 0 | Almost nothing of the original sentence reproduced |
With no preparation time, your approach has to happen while you listen, not after.
Example (written by LexiPTE) — sentence played once: "The committee postponed its decision until further research had been completed."
A test taker who catches every word repeats it exactly: "The committee postponed its decision until further research had been completed." This scores full Content credit because every word appears in the original sequence.
A test taker who only catches the main idea might say: "The committee delayed the decision until more research was done." This changes several words ("delayed" for "postponed", "more" for "further", a different verb tense) even though the meaning survives, so it would not earn full Content credit under a sequence-based, word-level scoring rule, even though it would likely score well on Oral Fluency if delivered smoothly and confidently.
The gap between these two responses shows why listening in phrases, not just for gist, matters for this specific task: Content credit tracks the actual words, not just the meaning you understood.
Repeat Sentence rewards short-term memory for exact wording more than general listening comprehension, so train the specific skill rather than only your listening in general.
The most common issues in Repeat Sentence come from how test takers listen, not how they speak.
Because this task depends on rapid short-term recall, build it with frequent short sessions rather than occasional long ones.
