A lecture plays once — audio only, you never see the text — then you get 10 seconds to gather yourself and 40 seconds to re-tell it in your own words. The whole task turns on one skill most people never practise properly: listening with a pen.
Content carries the widest range, and a person reads it.
The lecture's key points, re-told in your own words — topic, main ideas, conclusion.
Smooth and continuous for the full 40 seconds — no long hunts through your notes.
Every word clear. Accent isn't penalised; mumbled note-reading is.
One play, no transcript — the noteboard is where this task is won.
Write keywords in a simple frame as you listen: the topic on line one, a keyword line per main point, and the conclusion when it lands. Then your 40 seconds is just connecting the lines aloud:
"The lecture was about [topic] how cities affect bird populations. The speaker explained that [point 1] light pollution disrupts migration, and that [point 2] some species are adapting by singing at night. He concluded that [conclusion] urban planning now has to treat wildlife as a design factor."
That's four sentences at a calm pace — a full 40 seconds, all content. Notice what it isn't: it isn't every statistic, and it isn't a template ("The speaker discussed many important aspects…") that a human reviewer has read ten thousand times.
Reading along while listening feels productive and trains a task the exam doesn't have. On test day there is no text — only your ears and your notes.
✓ Fix: practise audio-only from day one. The transcript is for checking after you've answered, not during.Transcribing puts you three sentences behind the speaker — you'll capture the intro perfectly and miss the conclusion entirely.
✓ Fix: keywords only, in the topic/points/conclusion frame. Nouns and verbs; skip everything else."The speaker discussed several significant aspects of the topic…" says nothing — and Content goes through a human, with the widest scoring range in the task.
✓ Fix: name the actual topic, the actual points, the actual conclusion. Specific beats polished-but-empty, every time.Eyes down, voice flat, pace stop-start — fluency and pronunciation both sink while you decode your own handwriting.
✓ Fix: in the 10 prep seconds, pick your three things. Then speak to the mic, glancing at notes — not the reverse.Topic and one point takes fifteen seconds, and then panic-silence fills the rest — read as hesitation.
✓ Fix: the shape has four sentences for a reason. If you finish early, add what the speaker implied or why the point matters — reasoning is content too.Exam-real: audio only, notes pad, transcript only after you answer.
On The PTE Master, Re-tell Lecture runs the way the exam does: the lecture is heard, never shown, a notes pad stands in for the erasable noteboard, and the real 10s/40s timing runs. The transcript unlocks only after you've answered — so you can check what you missed without training the wrong skill.
Audio only, real timings, notes pad — and the transcript afterwards so you learn from every attempt.
Start practising