PTE Speaking Practice

The seven speaking question types

Part 1 of the test mixes speaking and writing and runs for 76 to 84 minutes. The speaking tasks come first, in this order. Several also feed your listening score, because you have to understand audio before you can answer.

Timings from Pearson's published PTE Academic format, updated for tests taken from 7 August 2025.

How speaking is scored

For Read Aloud, Repeat Sentence, Describe Image, Retell Lecture, Summarize Group Discussion and Respond to a Situation, Pearson assesses three things: content (what you said), pronunciation and oral fluency. Answer Short Question is scored on whether your answer is right, and it counts toward listening.

Since August 2025, some responses are part-scored by trained human raters as well as by Pearson's automated scoring. Pearson states that humans never score pronunciation or fluency. Answers that sound heavily templated or memorized may be flagged, so a flexible structure works better than a script you recite for every question.

The full picture of how the 10 to 90 scale works is in our guide to PTE scoring.

Try the personal introduction

The test starts with a 30-second personal introduction. It is not scored, but it gets you used to the microphone and the timer, and the institutions you send scores to may listen to it. It is a good warm-up here too.

How to practice PTE speaking online at home

Speaking practice only helps if your setup is close to the test. A few habits make a real difference:

• Use a headset microphone at a steady distance from your mouth. Laptop microphones pick up room noise and make the transcript less reliable.
• Start speaking within 3 seconds of the tone. In the test, the microphone closes if you stay silent for more than 3 seconds.
• Keep going when you make a mistake. Going back to fix a word breaks your fluency, and a pause longer than 3 seconds can end the recording.
• Listen back to every recording. You will hear rushed endings, dropped word endings and long pauses that you don't notice while speaking.
• Practice in short daily sets. Ten Repeat Sentence items a day builds more than one long session a week.

What feedback you get on MocksPTE

Each speaking question records your answer so you can play it back and gives you a sample answer to compare with. In Chrome, Edge and Safari, your browser's speech recognition also produces a transcript. We use it to mark matched and missed words in Read Aloud and Repeat Sentence, check your answer in Answer Short Question, and show which key points you covered in the longer tasks, along with your word count and speaking pace.

We don't score pronunciation or oral fluency the way Pearson's system does, and speech recognition can mishear words. Use the transcript as a guide to content and completeness, and your own ears for clarity.

A practice order that works

If you are new to PTE speaking, start with Read Aloud and Repeat Sentence. They are short, they appear many times in the test and they train the clear, even delivery every other task needs. Move on to Describe Image and Retell Lecture once you can speak for 40 seconds without long pauses. Leave the two newer tasks until you are comfortable summarizing, since both reward organized content.

Choose a speaking task