How to prepare for TOEFL iBT Speaking in 2026: can shadowing help?

What the Speaking section is now

ETS describes two task types:

• Listen and Repeat. "You will listen to short sentences and repeat them exactly as you hear them. This task measures your ability to process spoken English and produce speech that is accurate and clearly intelligible."
• Take an Interview. A simulated interview on academic or campus situations. You answer questions about your experiences and opinions, which "measures your ability to communicate clearly, maintain a natural speaking pace, and use appropriate vocabulary and grammar".

You may hear accents from North America, the UK, New Zealand or Australia. According to ETS, section scores and the overall score are now reported on a 1 to 6 scale, with a comparable 0 to 120 score also given for a two-year transition period after January 2026.

Why Listen and Repeat is close to shadowing

You hear a sentence once and say it back exactly. That takes two things: hearing every word, including the small unstressed ones that blur into their neighbours, and saying the sentence as one unit at a natural pace. Shadowing trains both. The difference is timing: shadowing is usually done along with the speaker, the test asks you to speak after. Practise both ways.

How to practise both tasks

1. Listen and Repeat. Use short campus-style sentences: a librarian explaining a rule, a tour guide, a lecturer giving instructions. Listen once, repeat in a pause. If you drop words, shadow the sentence three times along with the audio, then try again from one listen.
2. Accents. Mix speakers. If you only ever hear one accent, the first sentence in another one costs you words.
3. Take an Interview. Write short answers to likely questions about your studies, your habits and your opinions, then learn the phrases in them rather than the whole answer. Say each answer three times, a little shorter each time.
4. Pace. Record one answer and compare it with a native speaker on a similar question. Most learners are either rushing or stopping mid-clause; you will hear which.

What the research says

Hamada (2016) found shadowing improved phoneme perception in learners at two proficiency levels, the hearing side of Listen and Repeat. Foote and McDonough (2017) found eight weeks of phone-based shadowing improved how comprehensible and fluent learners sounded in free speech, though not their accentedness. In de Jong and Perfetti (2011), learners who repeated the same talk three times kept their fluency gains; learners who switched topics did not, which is the case for rehearsing interview answers more than once. A systematic review of 44 studies (Whitworth and Rose, 2025) supports shadowing for comprehensibility, fluency and prosody, with weaker evidence on individual sounds. None of these studies used TOEFL scores.

How to do it in Shadow

1. Make Listen and Repeat material. Ask Shadow to generate a monologue on a campus topic, like a library tour or course registration, or paste sentences 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 play and a pause to answer. Turn the pause off to shadow along. Slow any sentence down to 0.5x, then build back to full speed and beyond, up to 2x.
3. Bring other accents. Screen-record a lecture or a podcast with a different accent, or add the file, and drill it the same way.
4. Interview answers. Paste your answers under "Your text", hear them read naturally, and drill them hands-free. Practice mode plays the original and your take back to back with both pitch lines.
5. Record with camera. Film a full answer with the teleprompter and watch it back for pace.
6. Quiz and Learned. Say each phrase with the hardest words hidden. It reaches Learned only after practice on three different days.

Working with a teacher or TOEFL 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. Shadow does not score you, so a teacher's ear is the best check on how intelligible you are.

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

Did the TOEFL Speaking section change in 2026?

Yes. ETS now lists two Speaking task types, Listen and Repeat and Take an Interview, and reports scores on a 1 to 6 scale. Older books with four independent and integrated tasks describe the earlier test.

Is TOEFL Listen and Repeat the same as shadowing?

Close. Shadowing is usually done along with the audio, while Listen and Repeat asks you to speak after it. Practise both: shadowing builds rhythm and hearing, repeating after a pause matches the task.

Can shadowing improve my TOEFL score?

It trains the accuracy, clarity and pace the Speaking tasks describe, but no method guarantees a score.

Which accent should I practise for TOEFL?

Any you like for your own speech. For listening, mix accents: ETS says you may hear speakers from North America, the UK, New Zealand or Australia.

Does Shadow give a TOEFL score?

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

Sources

• 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
• 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
• de Jong, N. & Perfetti, C. A. (2011). Fluency training in the ESL classroom: An experimental study of fluency development and proceduralization. Language Learning, 61(2), 533-568. DOI
• 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
• ETS. TOEFL iBT Speaking section. www.ets.org
• ETS. TOEFL iBT test content and structure. www.ets.org