TOEFL 2026 note
The task names changed. Learn the ones you’ll actually meet
Half the advice online still uses the old TOEFL task names. Here are the twelve ETS uses for 2026, verbatim, so nothing on screen is a surprise.
Why this is worth three minutes
Nothing about the 2026 test is harder because of what the tasks are called. But a name you have never seen, appearing on a screen with a clock running, costs you a few seconds and some composure — and there is no slack in a test this short.
The bigger problem is searching. If you look for advice on “the integrated writing task” you will find a great deal of it, all describing an exercise that no longer exists. The names below are the ones to search with.
The twelve task names
| Section | Task, as ETS names it | Items |
|---|---|---|
| Reading | Complete the Words | 30 |
| Reading | Read in Daily Life | 5–15 |
| Reading | Read an Academic Passage | 5–15 |
| Listening | Listen and Choose a Response | 15–19 |
| Listening | Listen to a Conversation | 10 |
| Listening | Listen to an Announcement | 6–10 |
| Listening | Listen to an Academic Talk | 8–16 |
| Writing | Build a Sentence | 10 |
| Writing | Write an Email | 1 |
| Writing | Write for an Academic Discussion | 1 |
| Speaking | Listen and Repeat | 7 |
| Speaking | Take an Interview | 4 |
Three that are easy to get slightly wrong
It is “Listen and Choose a Response”, not “Choose the Response”. “Write for an Academic Discussion”, not “Join the Discussion”. “Listen and Repeat”, not “Listen & Repeat”. Near-miss versions circulate widely, including in otherwise good material.
What is no longer there
The independent opinion essay is gone. The integrated reading-and-lecture essay is gone. So is the long academic Reading section of two 700-word passages with ten questions each. Advice built on any of those describes a different examination.
Two of the twelve did not exist in any form before 2026: Listen and Choose a Response, and Build a Sentence. Between them they are up to 29 items — roughly a quarter of the whole test — and they are the two with the least practice material in existence.
The larger of the two →Up to 19 of Listening’s 47 items, and nobody has a practice tradition for it.Names are cheap. Meeting them is not.
You can memorise this table in two minutes and still lose time on the day, because recognising a name is not the same as knowing what the screen does with it — how long you get, what the controls are, whether the audio replays, where the questions appear.
The cheapest fix is to meet each task once under its real clock, so that on test day every screen is the second time you have seen it rather than the first.
Sit a full timed section →All four sections, built to the published blueprint and using ETS’s own task names. Free, no card.On the numbers in this note
ETS notes that its 2026 specifications are “subject to minor revisions … until the official launch”. Not affiliated with ETS. TOEFL is a registered trademark of ETS.