Authentic Materials for Teaching English

What is more, they reflect life very much on October 8th 1980. A few days earlier, or a few days later, they would have been meaningless. For instance, the advertisement “The world champion suit” which had been altered by a graffiti writer to “The ex-world champion suit” was on a poster which showed an English world champion boxer wearing a suit; the “ex” had been added because a few days before he had gone down to an ignominious defeat. No. 1, the newspaper headline “High Court Move on Rampton Brutality”, referred to an investigation into me troubles at a mental hospital called Rampton; this investigation is at a totally different stage at the moment of writing and will probably be quite forgotten by the time you read this. The point, then, is that much authentic writing is essentially ephemeral; it is highly relevant to the moment when it is written, but perishes з moment after. Nothing is so stale as yesterday's news.

 

Why should we use authentic materials?

 

By now, you may have been quite put off; if these are authentic materials, why should you use them and how can they fit into your classroom? Let us first look at some of the reasons for using them. Perhaps the most important is the students' motivation and interest. One of the powerful reasons for learning a new language is to get closer to its sneakers, tn understand them better and take part in their lives, in other words the integrative motivation. Authentic materials utilise this motivation very strongly by their ordinariness and flavour of everday life; they seem exotic and exciting, the very stuff of strange foreign life. For students who have this motivation, authentic materials are a highly effective way of bringing the target culture closer; this is as near to participation as they will get without actually living in the country. The content of the materials may not matter very much; it may not even worry them whether they understand it or not, provided it keeps their interest in the foreign culture alive.

Authentic materials are even more relevant for students who have the aim of going to the country itself. If they are to function in the foreign society they will have to get accustomed to all the trivial reading items that they will encounter every day. So if the students actually need to be able to communicate and interact socially in the target language environment, authentic materials seem an essential preparation for their task. Being able to cope with an English train timetable, to tell if they have the right ticket, to know which notices are important and addressed to them and which are not, all these are vital to their communicative purpose.

But what about students who are not integratively motivated and who are highly unlikely to visit the target culture? Why should we use authentic materials with them? Here it seems to me there is a more subtle reason of a rather different kind. All language syllabuses are defective representations of the target language; English has changed since the course was written or the grammatical description itself was inadequate. Also, we do not know enough about learning to be able to say that students would learn it 100% accurately even if the syllabus itself were 100% accurate. In other words, there may be gaps in the best of teaching programmes oecause there is still so much we do not know about English or about language learning. The only way we can make sure that we are giving the students all they need to know is by giving them authentic materials. These will automatically include any important structure or vocabulary we have ignored, if our authentic materials are representative and do not include the structures then, by definition, they are not important to native speakers. So it seems to me that spoken or written texts by native speakers are a vital way of plugging the gaps.

С. How Can they be Vsedin the Chissroom?

Authentic materials must be used in accordance with students' ability. (Baird, 2004).

The text should be used to serve its original purpose as if it is used outside the classroom. For example, if students are working with health brochures, they must look for information they need, rather than a list of new words chosen by the teacher (Jacobson, Degener, & Purcell-Gates, 2003). In this respect, Taylor (1994) states that “authenticity is not a characteristic of a text in itself: it is