The single biggest fix for forgetting parts of longer Listen and Repeat sentences is to stop trying to memorize word by word and instead hold onto the sentence's structure and meaning — your brain reconstructs a sentence far more reliably from "what happened, to whom, when" than from a string of individual words.
Take the free TOEFL Benchmark Test and get your estimated band score in about 45 minutes.
Break the sentence into 2–3 meaning-based chunks as you hear it, rather than treating it as a flat sequence of words. "Due to construction, / the north entrance / will be closed until further notice" is three chunks: a reason, a subject, and an action. Holding three chunks in memory is far easier than holding twelve individual words, and it naturally preserves word order within each chunk.
Each Listen and Repeat sentence comes with a small image for context. Glance at it before the audio starts and use it to build a quick mental scene — a mall, a classroom, a hallway sign. Anchoring the sentence to a visual scene gives your memory a second retrieval path beyond the words themselves, which is especially useful for longer sentences where pure verbal memory starts to fail.
A common instinct is to guess where a sentence is going partway through and stop listening as closely to the second half — this is exactly what causes the most common error pattern, dropping content from the end of the sentence. Train yourself to listen at full attention through the very last word, even when the sentence's direction seems obvious early on.
Take the free TOEFL Benchmark Test and get your estimated band score in about 45 minutes.
Working memory for this specific task improves with targeted practice. Start with short sentences and deliberately work up to longer ones with multiple clauses, rather than practicing only at one difficulty level — see our practice examples for sentences at increasing difficulty to drill this progression directly.
Drill Listen and Repeat with sentences at increasing length and difficulty.