There’s quite a lot of competition for this prize, but the task I’m talking about is astounding not only for it being almost impossible for students to either learn language or improve their listening skills from it, but also for being included in most units of a whole series of textbooks. And the “winner” is:
“Listen and tick which of the phrases the speaker uses” in the Market Leader books. The phrases given are equally useful and usually the same level of formality etc, so the student learns nothing about the language from which one is actually used by the speaker. Because they’ve chosen phrases that are similar only in function, it also means being able to hear which one is used is no test of listening skills at all.
I don’t generally mind the Market Leader books, but the pointlessness and laziness of this exercise makes me angry time and time again. For one thing, it would have been so easy to make it useful, for example by getting them to do some other comprehension task first, then try to recall which phrases were used before listening again to check. However, you usually have to write your own comprehension questions in order to be able to do it this way. F**kwits!
Any other candidates for worst listening exercise ever?
TEFLtastic 
quite agree..hmm, what I don’t like about Market Leader books is that their listening exercises are usually one-voiced and sounding a bit dull.. why not include dialogues instead of monologues, just fo ra change..?!
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Absolutely! Don’t know how I’d forgotten about their droney-voiced interviews that make up most of their listenings. I seem to remember the one in Unit 1 of Pre-Int New Edition was enough to make me want to give up and die. And that makes it still worse that there’s no proper listening comprehension development in the dialogues that they do have.
Maybe come to think of it I do mind Market Leader! We’ve switched to Business Result, and overall I think that’s an improvement.
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Unfortunately, just noticed something almost as stupid in Business Result. Sometimes students have to list for language used in the recording while a list of useful language with exactly the same phrases is right next to that listening exercise. You can obviously just get them to cover it up, but that feels a bit childish in an Advanced business text and points out the weakness of the book to them in a less than subtle way.
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