Differentiated Instructions: Implementing Tiered Listening Tasks in Mixed-Ability EFL Context

Language teachers are usually faced with the challenging classrooms wherein the students with mixed language abilities sit together. One solution to deal with this situation is to apply differentiated instructions in terms of tiered task strategy. By definition, tiered tasks are extracted from the same material or skills, and personalized according to students' readiness, interest and preferred modes of learning. In the same vein, this experiment investigated the role of tiered listening tasks on 46 mixed-ability Iranian EFL learners in 9 intervention sessions. The participants were pre-assessed and assigned in to 3 divisions of high, mid and low achievers. While the control group in this research experienced the conventional one-size-fits-all instructions to listening comprehension, the divisions in the experimental group received open-ended, multiple choice and true-false tiered listening tasks. Moreover, upon the individual’s performance on tiered tasks, their division arrangement changed every 3 sessions so that they either remained or to be removed to higher or lower divisions. Findings statistically implicated the effectiveness of the tiered tasks on the participants’ listening comprehension improvement. However, the observed matrix of multiple correlation coefficients failed to show any powerful association between the participants’ mixed-levels of language proficiency and their successful performance on tiered tasks. The researchers’ concluding remarks on the assessment and teaching benefits of differentiated instructions in EFL contexts were provided too.