Authentic Materials for Teaching English

Types of Authenticity:

Breen (1985) identifies four types of authenticity within language teaching. He indicates that these types are in continual interrelationship with one another during any language lesson. These types include:

1. Authenticity of the texts which we may use as input data for our learners.

2. Authenticity of the learners' own interpretations of such texts.

3. Authenticity of tasks conductive to language learning.

4. Authenticity of the actual social situation of the language classroom. Each one of these types will be discussed below.

1. Authenticity of the texts which we may use as input data for our (earners:

This refers to the authentic qualities of a given text. Authentic texts for language learning are any sources of data which serves as a means to help the learner to develop an authentic interpretation.

2. Authenticity of the [earners' own interpretations of such texts:

Learner, authenticity means that the learner must discover the conventions of communication in the target language which will enable him or her to gradually come to interpret meaning within the text in ways wnich are iikely to be shared with fluent users of the language.

3. Authenticity oftashs conductive to language (earning:

Task authenticity reflects the purpose to which language input is put. It means that the chosen tasks should involve the learners not only in authentic communication with texts and others in the classroom, but also in learning and the purpose of learning.

4. Authenticity of the actualsocialsituation of the language classroom: The authenticity of the classroom is a special social event and environment wherein people share a primary communicative purpose that is learning. The authentic role of the language classroom is the provision of those conditions in which the participants can publicly share the problems, achievements and overall process of learning a language together as a social activity.

How can speaking and writing activities he authentic?

Hedge (2000) indicates that speaking and writing can be authentic if they reflect the relevant criteria for task design discussed earlier, and also mirror the real world purposes and situations in which and for which language is used. Examples of such tasks are:

•A note to a neighbor apologizing for a noisy party.

•A letter of complaint about a product to the manufacturer.

 

How can one teach authentic materials?

 

One important issue in teaching authentic materials is whether the activities one uses are natural or not. By natural, I mean those that the native speakers themselves use for dealing with the materials. For instance, it is perfectly natural to look at a train timetable to discover the next train to London, or the fastest train to London, or the one that has a buffet car; though the activity in the classroom is unnatural to the extent that the students do not really want this information here and now, it is a possible way of using the timetable that they may need at some time in the future outside the classroom.

As in this instance, one important type of natural activity is using the information in the text for some reason; many kinds of information processing exercise can be devised for the classroom that use some natural activity. For example, the railway ticket could be used in an exercise where the students were told that they had asked for a first class monthly return to Oxford: have they been given the right ticket?

Shading across from natural to unnatural activities come various types of comprehension exercise. Students may be given headlines such as no. 1, and asked to try to explain what they mean. Obviously, they are uniikeiy to oe rotaiiy right, but the teacher can accept anything that conveys the grammatical and lexical spirit of the headline, which often has a kind of structure that in itself poses problems for students. So the teacher can exploit the grammatical and lexical richness of the authentic materials by various comprehension and discussion techniques.

A third type of exercise that I am keen on depends upon another advantage of authentic materials that has not yet been touched on: their range of styles. Often in language teaching we adopt a single model of English which has iittie or no variation according to the person who is being addressed, the topic that is being talked about, the circumstances in which the language is being used, and all the other factors in stylistic variation. Students eventually need to be able to adjust their language in these subtle ways that the native speaker