Abstract:

Students specializing in linguistics need to develop their listening comprehension skills because the ability to understand oral statements is an essential part of foreign language communication. Although the basic course books included in the curriculum contain a considerable number of listening exercises, students still need extra practice, because they experience enormous difficulty doing listening comprehension assignments.

Since numerous videos in different foreign languages are available on the Internet, it seems logical to use them as teaching materials. After all, the best way of acquiring listening skills is getting as much practice as possible, which can be achieved by watching additional foreign language videos. However, listening comprehension tasks should be targeted at particular learners, challenging and yet feasible. Moreover, they should enable students to do some parts of work in collaboration. Otherwise watching additional videos might not bring about the desired effect.

As students are the key stakeholders in the educational process, it makes sense to conduct a comprehensive survey among them to gather information about their attitudes to different aspects of watching foreign language videos.

Therefore, the main objectives of the article are the following:
- to draw up and circulate a questionnaire aimed at getting students to state their preferences as to what kinds of videos they are interested in and what format of work they expect to do;
- to analyze the results of the questionnaire and to come up with a system of video assignments based on the students’ answers to the questionnaire. Some parts of the tasks should be intended for pairs or small groups of students working in collaboration;
- to test the system of assignments in groups of linguistic majors working in collaboration;
- to prepare and distribute a questionnaire among the participants of the experiment in order to find out their opinions about the set of assignments and to look at their suggestions for further improvements of the teaching materials.

Thus the research is aimed at developing a customized system of assignments that will increase students’ motivation for improving their listening comprehension skills. Many of these video-based tasks are supposed to be done by students working in collaboration. The learner-centered approach to designing the teaching materials gives the article its innovative nature. When educationalists develop video assignments on the basis of their own judgments, they can face a backlash, because they might not be on the same wavelength with their students. Learners often prefer to watch videos covering particular aspects of the topics from the basic course book. They may have certain preferences concerning the genre of the videos, their length, and the format of the assignments. The teaching materials developed in this way can be applied both in the course of face-to-face learning and on educational platforms like Moodle.

Keywords:

Collaboration, listening comprehension skills, survey, questionnaire, video, developing assignments, teaching materials, students’ opinions.