Listen to a Conversation: practice recordings, transcripts and answers
Two speakers, one problem, and a solution that arrives late. The conversation task rewards tracking who wants what — so every recording below is published with the whole transcript, the questions, the keyed answers and why each distractor was written.
What Listen to a Conversation asks you to do
- A recorded exchange between two speakers in a campus setting — a student and a member of staff, or two students — usually built around a problem and its resolution.
- Questions follow the recording and ask about the gist, a detail, a speaker’s attitude, or what someone will do next.
- The whole recording plays before the questions. You cannot scrub back to a moment.
What ETS states
The 2026 specification lists the Listening section at 47 items and 35 raw points, with task types Listen and Choose a Response, Listen to a Conversation, Listen to an Announcement, and Listen to an Academic Talk.
These are published blueprint values, which the specification states are subject to minor revisions until the official launch. The item count includes non-scored items, so items do not equal raw points — the specification lists a maximum of 1 point per scored item.
The specification lists an estimated Listening time of an 18 minute router plus a second-stage module of 7 minutes (lower) or 11 minutes (upper).
The times are estimated, and the two module lengths are discrete listed values — not a sliding 7-to-11-minute range.
Listening items are machine-scored selected responses, evaluated by rule-based algorithms per the specification’s item-type notes.
Machine-scored is not exclusive to Reading and Listening — Build a Sentence is machine-scored too. This says nothing about how Reach120 scores your practice.
Sourced from the ETS 2026 test specifications, read 2026-07-27. Everything outside this box is Reach120’s own reading of it.
What the task actually measures
- Whether you held the shape of the conversation, not only its sentences.
- Whether you can tell what a speaker said from what they implied.
- Whether you noticed the turn where the problem changed.
How this task type is scored
Every item on this task type is a selected response with one keyed answer, so a practice attempt is either right or wrong and there is no rubric to argue with. What the practice is worth is the reason a distractor pulled you — which is why every question below publishes why the key is right and why each wrong option looks right.
How to practise it without wasting the material
- 1Take notes on the problem and the proposed fixes while the audio plays, then answer before reading the transcript.
- 2After answering, read the transcript and mark the exact line the key depends on. Most missed items turn on one sentence.
- 3Treat the attitude questions separately — they fail for a different reason than the detail questions, and mixing them hides which one you are actually losing.
Listen to a Conversation: common questions
- How long is a TOEFL conversation recording?
- ETS does not publish a per-recording length. The Reach120 practice recordings on this page print their own duration beside each transcript, so you are pacing against a real number rather than a remembered one.
- Should I take notes?
- Notes help most on this task type because the questions reward the arc of the exchange. Practise the note style you intend to use on test day rather than a different one.
- Are these real TOEFL conversations?
- No. These are Reach120 practice recordings written and produced for the 2026 task format. Nothing on this page is published, licensed, endorsed or reviewed by ETS.