(Re)creating listening source texts for a high-stakes standardized English test at a Vietnamese university: abandoning the search in vain

This chapter argues for viewing listening source texts (LSTs) as a hybrid genre and shares a practical approach to developing LSTs for a high-stakes standardized English test at a Vietnamese university. Presented as a series of autoethnographic vignettes, the paper details the enormous challenges facing the author in his quest for “perfect” authentic texts that had to fit both text and item specifications. These problems were not surmounted until the author, inspired by empirical item writing research, had taken a more liberal approach which involves substantial editing or even creating LSTs from scratch to match test items. The author’s success in adopting this liberal approach has led him to support the view of LSTs as a hybrid genre with features derived from both the exams they are situated in and real-world texts in the target language use domain. The chapter concludes with implications for item writer training, and simultaneously calls for caution in using the special genre of LSTs.