ИСТИНА

The paper highlights the main principles of designing tasks for “Just Train Your Brain” Olympiad – a distance competition on the English language and the culture of English-speaking countries. The competition is aimed at advanced university students from Russia and CIS countries, who participate in the contest in the distance format on the volunteer basis. The 7-year experience of organizing the competition allowed us to formulate the following task design principles. Tasks for such competitions need to be instructional, motivating, engaging and thought-provoking. They should control the maximum of linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences (according to CEFR), require from students a significant amount of independent study, advanced information search and processing skills, a considerably high level of multimedia literacy, going beyond general academic expectations, and applying creative approach. Meanwhile, such tasks must be doable for students, assessable for contest organizers, and appropriate for distance format. As each round of the competition is eliminatory, the first tasks should be interactive, have a single correct answer and be evaluated automatically. Final tasks can be sophisticated, require creation of an information product and its individual evaluation by contest jury members. “Just Train Your Brain” tasks highlight various aspects of history and culture of English-speaking countries: new facets of major phenomena, curious details, modern trends or cross-cultural connections. Research and mystery tasks are formulated so that they cannot be solved simply by finding the answer on a particular Internet or book page. Most tasks include multimedia and interactive online components. Each “Just Train Your Brain” competition consists of 3 rounds: 1) filling out an interactive multimedia crossword, 2) solving a mystery, for example, guessing the title of a book or a movie by listening to or watching an abstract, and providing some reflection on the related work, 3) creating an information product: writing an essay on the basis of a video clip, creating a presentation, making a video essay, etc. The competition has already covered such themes as the past and the present of Great Britain, British theatre, Royal England, American dream, and Australia. In 2010, the first contest of this format was organized in German featuring Austria. All materials related to the competition including tasks, evaluation criteria, examples of the best answers, preparation assignments, and useful links can be found on the contest websites: http://just-english.ru/0e.htm, http://aus.lingvograd.ru/english.html and http://www.austriada.ru.