TOEFL Speaking
TOEFL iBT Speaking preparation for the January 2026 format: Listen and Repeat and Take an Interview, with strategies, sample answers and practice drills.
The TOEFL iBT Speaking section was redesigned in January 2026. It now has 11 items in about 8 minutes: seven Listen and Repeat items, where you hear a short sentence and repeat it exactly, and four Take an Interview questions, a simulated interview about academic or campus situations in which you talk about your experiences and opinions. Every response is scored by AI.
There is no examiner in the room and no face-to-face conversation: you listen to the audio and speak into a microphone. The old four-task format, with its independent opinion question, integrated reading-and-listening summaries and a Speaking score out of 30, has been retired, so templates written for it no longer match the test.
Scores changed too. Each section, and the test overall, is now reported on a 1–6 band scale aligned with CEFR levels A1 to C2. For a two-year transition after January 2026, test takers also receive a comparable overall score on the familiar 0–120 scale.
The guides below explain how each new task works and how to practise for it: chunking, stress and shadowing for Listen and Repeat, and answer frameworks for the factual, experience, opinion, explanation, prediction and narration questions in Take an Interview.
