Free to start — no card
TOEFL Listening practice test
Four recordings, 47 questions, 29 minutes — played once, with all four listening task types of the January 2026 section.
Format checked against ETS on .
The paper we run
Four recordings, 47 questions, 29 minutes. Every one plays once, with note-taking allowed while the audio runs — which is the skill the section is really testing.
This is the section ETS has set since 21 January 2026. The eight question types the old paper was known for — Connecting Content, Speaker Attitude and the rest — are not in it, and a tool still drilling them is drilling a paper nobody sits.
All four listening task types
- Listen and Choose a Response — one turn of a conversation, and the natural reply from three. Seventeen of the forty-seven items.
- Listen to a Conversation — two speakers, ten questions. The one count ETS fixes rather than ranges.
- Listen to an Announcement — a campus notice read aloud, eight questions.
- Listen to an Academic Talk — the closest thing to the old lecture, twelve questions.
The one that is new, and is a third of the section
Listen and Choose a Response is seventeen of the forty-seven items and did not exist before 2026. You hear someone say one thing — a question, a complaint, an offer — and choose the reply that fits, from three. It is over in seconds and there is nothing to take notes on.
It is a different skill from following a lecture, and it is the part candidates coming from older practice material have never rehearsed. Seventeen items is more than a third of the section.
Every question is answerable from the recording
The generator refuses a question whose answer is not really spoken in the transcript. A question you cannot answer by listening looks exactly like a hard one — the candidate gets it wrong either way, and nothing downstream can tell which happened. So the check is made before the audio is ever synthesised.
A conversation is read in two voices, too. A conversation in one voice is a monologue with quotation marks, and following two people is the task.
Adaptive on the day, a fixed form here
Listening is a two-stage adaptive section: how you do in the first stage decides whether the second is harder or easier, which is why ETS publishes three of the four item counts as ranges rather than numbers. Practice here is a fixed form at the published length, taking the middle of each range, and the screen says so before you start.
It plays once
In a mock, no pause and no replay — the real test plays each recording once, so a rehearsal that allows replay is rehearsing something else. In section practice you get a play-once switch separate from the timer, because wanting a single hearing and wanting a countdown are two different decisions and you should not have to take both.
The recordings are synthesised and written for this product, which is what makes an unlimited bank possible — and it means the accent range is narrower than a real TOEFL test. Worth practising elsewhere as well.
Questions, answered
How many questions are in TOEFL Listening?
Forty-seven, in 29 minutes, across four recordings: seventeen short listen-and-reply items, a ten-question conversation, an eight-question campus announcement and a twelve-question academic talk. Each recording plays once, and you may take notes while it plays — which is what the section is really testing.
What question types are in TOEFL Listening?
Four, since the January 2026 redesign: Listen and Choose a Response, Listen to a Conversation, Listen to an Announcement and Listen to an Academic Talk. All four listening task types are generated here, audio included.
What is Listen and Choose a Response?
You hear one turn of a conversation — someone asks you something, or says something that needs answering — and pick the natural reply from three. There is no passage and no note-taking worth doing: it is over in seconds. It is seventeen of the section's forty-seven items, so it is the largest single part of TOEFL Listening and the one that did not exist before 2026.
Can I replay the TOEFL Listening audio?
Not in a mock — the real test plays each recording once, so a rehearsal that allows replay is rehearsing a different test. In section practice you get a play-once switch that is separate from the timer, because wanting one hearing and wanting a countdown are two different decisions.
Is this the current TOEFL Listening format?
Yes. ETS redesigned the TOEFL iBT on 21 January 2026 and this is the redesigned Listening section: forty-seven items across the four task types above, reported as a 1 to 6 band rather than a score out of 30. ETS also reports a comparable 0 to 120 total until January 2028.
Free to start — one section practice a day, no card.
The rest of the paper
TOEFL Reading, Speaking and Writing have their own pages, and the full TOEFL practice test covers all four. Add them up on the TOEFL score calculator.