DESIGNING TASKS FOR LISTENING FACILITATION BASED ON AUTHENTIC MATERIALS BY THIRD-YEAR FAST-TRACK STUDENTS AT FELTE, ULIS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF LISTENING SKILLS FOR THEIR PEERS =

Abstract

Under the light of Communicative Language Teaching approach, the use of authentic materials together with effective tasks designed based on this kind of input has been warmly encouraged to be employed in the language learning environment worldwide in order to bridge the gap between classroom knowledge and real world practices. Likewise, in Vietnam, as one of the pioneers in foreign language teaching and learning, the Fast-track group at ULIS, VNU has made an attempt to let students benefit from the authentic texts themselves by including a number of projects asking them to design suitable tasks based on real-life materials for the development of language skills for their peers. This study, particularly, aimed at investigating the issue in listening facilitation, one of the projects mentioned above. Specifically, the research paper shed light on both students’ self-designing tasks and the assessment of these tasks. What is more, by identifying the obstacles they faced during the process of designing those tasks, the paper offered several pedagogical suggestions for designing more effective tasks based on authentic materials. For the data collection, four instruments, namely questionnaires, interviews, classroom observation, and lesson plan analyses, were applied with 22 students from group 09.1.E1 as targeted participants. The results showed that a number of pedagogical tasks focusing on the comprehension of the texts had been designed whereas authentic tasks were paid little attention to by the students. Regarding the effectiveness of these tasks, the study revealed that students were quite optimistic about the benefits they gained although the task designers were all students who lacked experience and professional training in task-designing. Finally, to maximize the effectiveness of students’ self-designing tasks based on authentic materials, recommendations for students, regarding both their own preparation and teacher’s scaffolding and instructions, have been provided.