How to prepare for PTE Academic Speaking: can shadowing help?

The speaking tasks and how they are scored

According to Pearson, Part 1 of PTE Academic (Speaking and Writing) includes these speaking tasks:

• Read Aloud. "Text appears on the screen. Read the text aloud."
• Repeat Sentence. "After listening to a recording of a sentence, repeat the sentence." The prompt is 3 to 9 seconds; you have 15 seconds to answer.
• Describe Image. 25 seconds to prepare, 40 seconds to describe the image.
• Retell Lecture, Summarize Group Discussion, Respond to a Situation. Longer answers in your own words.
• Answer Short Question. A word or a few words; scored right or wrong, not on fluency or pronunciation.

Every task above except Answer Short Question is scored on content, pronunciation and oral fluency. Pearson's wording is worth knowing. Oral fluency: "scored by determining if your rhythm, phrasing and stress are smooth", and "hesitations, repetitions and false starts will negatively affect your score". Pronunciation: whether your speech "is easily understandable to most regular speakers of the language", and Pearson "recognizes regional and national varieties of English pronunciation" to that degree. You need clarity, not a particular accent.

Why Repeat Sentence is nearly shadowing

Repeat Sentence asks you to hold a sentence you heard once and say it back with the same words, rhythm and stress. Content is scored by counting correct words; replacements, insertions and omissions cost you. Shadowing trains the two halves of that: hearing every word, including the small unstressed ones, and producing the sentence as one smooth unit instead of word by word. The main difference is timing: in the test you speak after the sentence, so practise both with a pause and without one.

How to practise each task

1. Repeat Sentence. Take academic-sounding sentences of 8 to 15 words. Hear each once, then say it in a pause. If you lose the end, shadow it a few times, then try again after a single listen.
2. Read Aloud. Hear a native speaker read the passage first. Mark where they pause and which words carry stress, then read it yourself and compare. Pearson counts false starts against fluency, so keep going through a slip instead of starting the sentence again.
3. Describe Image and Retell Lecture. Collect flexible phrases rather than a fixed script: the chart compares, the highest figure is, overall, it shows that. Drill them until they come out without a pause, then use them on new images under time.
4. Every day: ten to fifteen minutes. A few sentences a day on several days beats a hundred in one evening.

What the research says

A systematic review of 44 studies (Whitworth and Rose, 2025) found shadowing can improve comprehensibility, fluency and prosody, with weaker evidence on individual sounds. Foote and McDonough (2017) found learners who shadowed on a phone for eight weeks were rated more comprehensible and fluent, though not significantly less accented. For the listening half of Repeat Sentence, Hamada (2016) found shadowing improved phoneme perception in learners at two proficiency levels. None of these studies used PTE scores, so they support the skills, not a number.

How to do it in Shadow

1. Make Repeat Sentence material. Ask Shadow to generate a monologue on an academic topic, or paste sentences you collected under "Your text". It voices them in a British or American accent and cuts them into phrases.
2. Set the drill like the task. One repeat, a pause as long as the phrase or twice as long, so you hear it once and answer. Turn the pause off to shadow along.
3. Read Aloud practice. Paste a passage, hear it read naturally, slow it to 0.7x if you need to, then record yourself reading it in Practice mode and hear the original and your take back to back, with both pitch lines.
4. Describe Image phrases. Save your phrases, drill them hands-free on the way to work, and quiz yourself with the hardest words hidden.
5. Learned. A phrase is marked Learned only after practice on three different days, which is how you know it will be there on test day.

Working with a teacher or PTE coach

Shadow does not replace a teacher. It gives your teacher better material. Record yourself in Practice mode, or film a full run with Record with camera, and play it next to the original. Note the gaps you can hear yourself: the phrase you rush, the word that comes out flat, the sentence where your voice drops too early. Then send the take to your teacher, so they correct the exact sound or stress instead of guessing what you do between lessons. PTE is scored by machine, so a coach who has seen many results can tell you which task is costing you most. Shadow does not score you.

One concrete case. Photograph is stressed on the first syllable, PHOtograph. Photography moves the stress to the second, phoTOgraphy, and the first vowel shrinks. British and American dictionaries agree on both (photograph, photography in the Cambridge Dictionary). Plenty of learners carry the first pattern into the second word and never notice. A teacher hears it in two seconds, tells you which syllable to move, and you drill that one phrase until it comes out right.

Frequently asked

Is PTE Repeat Sentence the same as shadowing?

Close, not identical. In shadowing you usually speak along with the audio; in Repeat Sentence you speak after it. Practise both: shadowing builds the rhythm, repeating after a pause matches the test.

Does accent matter in PTE?

Pearson says it recognises regional and national varieties of English pronunciation as long as they are understandable to most regular speakers. Clarity, stress and smooth rhythm matter more than a particular accent.

Can shadowing improve my PTE score?

It trains oral fluency and pronunciation, which several speaking tasks are scored on, but no method guarantees a score.

How do I stop hesitating in Read Aloud?

Hear the passage read naturally first, mark the pauses, and keep going through a slip instead of restarting. Pearson says hesitations, repetitions and false starts lower the fluency score.

Does Shadow give a PTE score?

No. It plays your take next to a native reading and shows both pitch lines, so you can hear the difference yourself. It does not grade you.

Sources

• Whitworth, B. & Rose, H. (2025). A Systematic Review of Research on the use of Shadowing for Second Language Pronunciation Teaching. Research Synthesis in Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 239-269. DOI
• Foote, J. A. & McDonough, K. (2017). Using shadowing with mobile technology to improve L2 pronunciation. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 3(1), 34-56. DOI
• Hamada, Y. (2016). Shadowing: Who benefits and how? Uncovering a booming EFL teaching technique for listening comprehension. Language Teaching Research, 20(1), 35-52. DOI
• Pearson. PTE Academic test format: Speaking and Writing. www.pearsonpte.com