In the light of communicative approach, “communicative competence” is the ultimate aim of foreign language teaching and learning or in other words, it is the “goal” of the teaching and learning process (Richards & Rodgers, 1995:67). In order to obtain the communicative competence, foreign language learners are supposed to focus on all the four skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Among these four skills, listening is often considered to be the most important skill to be acquired as “in the foreign language environment, the ability to make sense of these messages is often crucial for survival” (Hood, 1994:65). As a result, listening has been paid much attention to by language researchers and teachers. Many researches have been conducted on how to teach and learn listening skills effectively. For instance, on the website: www.abax.co.jp/listen, an article named “Teaching Listening Better: is listening being taught as well as it could be?” provides readers with a thorough overview of how listening should be taught; Penny Urr (1992) dedicated a nearly-two-hundred-page book on “Teaching Listening Comprehension” and Gillian Brown (1984) also wrote “Listening to spoken English”. All these contributions are very useful for enhancing the listening skills. However, as far as the writer has investigated, most of the researches focus largely on methods of teaching and learning rather than on exploring new sources of authentic materials for teachers to make use of. Nowadays, together with the already diversified published materials for teaching listening, there co-exists a new abundant source of listening materials on the World Wide Web. The use of the Internet has changed the world dramatically. Yet in Vietnam, where the Internet had not been known until 1997, it is still new to many teachers of English who are hesitant to use it even when it is accessible. For the time being, several teachers at the English Department, Tay Bac University are employing available materials to teach listening skills to their students. However, the use of authentic materials in designing listening tasks is done spontaneously without any formal guidelines. Thus, a study on designing listening tasks with authentic materials would be of value. It is hoped that the thesis would bring about some benefits to EFL teachers who teach listening skills.