Accents
The same sentence, four accents
Both IELTS and TOEFL mix accents on purpose, and a candidate who has only ever practised with one is at a disadvantage that has nothing to do with their English. Below is one sentence read by four speakers. It is the same words and the same gender every time, so what changes between them is the accent and nothing else.
Right — I'll be about twenty minutes. I'm stopping at the market for six tomatoes and a bottle of water, then I'll come straight to yours.
Right — I'll be about twenty minutes. I'm stopping at the market for six tomatoes and a bottle of water, then I'll come straight to yours.
Right — I'll be about twenty minutes. I'm stopping at the market for six tomatoes and a bottle of water, then I'll come straight to yours.
Right — I'll be about twenty minutes. I'm stopping at the market for six tomatoes and a bottle of water, then I'll come straight to yours.
What to listen for
Three questions separate all four. Is the r in market and water pronounced? Only the American speaker says it. Does the t in water sound like a soft d, and does twenty arrive as twenny? That is American too. And does the vowel in six drift towards uh? That is the New Zealand tell, and the quickest way to separate New Zealand from Australian, since both drop the r.
British and Australian share the missing r and differ in their vowels, which is why an ear trained only on British recordings can still lose an Australian Part 3.
How the two exams distribute accents
IELTS is produced jointly by the British Council, IDP and Cambridge, and its published accent set is British, Australian, New Zealand and North American. You may meet several within a single test, and the speaker usually changes between parts — so being comfortable with one accent and not the others is a weakness the format is built to find.
TOEFL is mostly North American, with British, Australian and New Zealand voices used alongside. Lecturers are typically North American; conversation and announcement voices vary more, so the accents you meet depend on which tasks your adaptive route gives you.
Neither exam names Canadian separately — both describe that accent as North American, which is why there are four pages here rather than five.
Why the missing r costs more than it should
Most learners build their English from writing, so the written word is the version the ear is hunting for. Three of these four accents drop the r after a vowel, which means market, water and yours arrive missing a sound that is there on the page. The ear spends a fraction of a second looking for it, and that fraction is enough to lose the next few words — which is how one unfamiliar accent turns into a lost answer and then a lost paragraph.
The fix is not more vocabulary. It is hearing the same words in more than one mouth until the version without the r stops being a surprise, which is what these four clips are for.
One page each
British
Non-rhotic, with a t you can usually hear.
What to listen for →
American
Rhotic, and the t in the middle of a word often sounds like a d.
What to listen for →
Australian
Non-rhotic like British, with noticeably different vowels.
What to listen for →
New Zealand
Non-rhotic, with the vowel shift that makes “six” sound like “sux”.
What to listen for →
Is an accent costing you marks, or is it something else?
The free listening check is six short clips in real accents and three minutes. It gives an indicative band and, more usefully, which listening skills your misses cluster in.
Take the free listening test →For longer exposure, Lisenia Daily runs short real-speed scenes across accents, and the IELTS and TOEFL pages set out which accents each exam actually uses.
Lisenia is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the British Council, IDP, Cambridge Assessment English or ETS. These samples are synthesised voices used to illustrate accent features, not recordings of exam material.