Authentic Materials in Language Teaching

Mohammad Alipour Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz Branch

Authentic materials refer to the use of texts, photos, video selections, and other teaching resources that were not specifically prepared for pedagogical purposes. Created materials refer to specifically developed instructional resources. Some say that authentic materials are preferred because they contain authentic language and reflect real-world uses of language.

They have a positive effect on learners motivation because they are linguistically more interesting. They provide authentic cultural information about the target culture. They provide exposure to real language rather than artificial texts which illustrate particular grammatical rules. They relate more closely to learners needs and hence provide a link between classroom and learners real needs. They support a more creative approach to teaching.

Created materials can also be motivating. They often include difficult language and unneeded vocabulary. Created materials are based on a graded syllabus and provide systematic coverage of teaching items. Using them is a burden for teachers.

Childrens language learning is a natural-authentic- activity. It is ironic that the 20th century brought forth some of history s most contrived methods for teaching. This is not to say that such methods as ALM or DM were necessarily less effective because of this, but it was not until the late 1960s that the most natural approach, the learning of language as communication and through communication, began to take role.

The communicative approach has by now become engrained in language teaching and has been consolidated by the revolution in information and communications technologies (ICT). ICT effectively concretized the concept of communication at the same time as opening up unlimited access to authentic texts from the target language culture, thereby impelling the issue of authenticity of texts and interactions to the fore in language pedagogy.

The authenticity-centered approach directly informs the design of language learning materials, exemplifying the symbiotic relationship between the approach to learning and the content or the materials used in applying it.

The central premises of the authenticity-centered approach are the use of authentic texts for language learning and the preserving of this authenticity throughout the procedures in which they are implicated. The rationale for this approach essentially, the reasons why authenticity is important at all in language learning draws on second language acquisition research on one hand, and on pedagogical experience on the other.

The authenticity-centered approach deploys a pedagogical model that has become broadly accepted and applied in language learning, the task. Task in relation to language learning is generally described in such terms as a goal-oriented communicative activity with a specific outcome where the emphasis is on exchanging meanings, not producing specific language forms .

The marriage of the authentic texts and the task model is a felicitous one, in that both derive from the real-world , with the notion of task in pedagogy today broadening to encompass personal and divergent tasks as well as more practical ones.

It is perhaps incumbent to deal at the outset with the issue of adopting terms like authentic and authenticity, so weighed by the value judgment implicit in their gloss as real, genuine, and pure. Such value judgments have meant that authentic materials and authenticity are a naturally appealing proposition for language practitioners and learners alike.

Yet, as has eloquently been described in Cook (2000), language play is at the heart of learning our first language and remains central to our socialization throughout our lives. The artificiality of the classroom and the suspension of reality in the pedagogical situation reveal learners as willing collaborators in the learning game.

It is interesting to surmise what made the appeal of authenticity so strong as to have become the predominant paradigm for language teaching classroom. The theoretical authenticity debate has been all but sidelined in the rush to exploit authentic texts for pedagogical purposes. The authenticity explosion is probably in part a consequence of the symbiotic relationship between two movements the sociological one and the pedagogical one.

The first is the aforementioned revolution in information and communications technologies which has opened up access to authentic texts of all types in hundreds of world languages. The second is the shift toward self-direction in learning, the transferring of the responsibility for learning, and the paths to information and knowledge from the teacher to the learner.

Authenticity is a term which creates confusion because of a basic ambiguity. Authenticity in language learning is born of prevailing currents from three areas. The first is from SLA research, the second is from language pedagogy itself communicative and approaches to language learning, and the third is sociological the growing influence of information and communications technologies (ICT) on our work and learning practices.

There is substantial research evidence to support the use in language learning of the linguistically rich, culturally faithful and potentially emotive input supplied by authentic texts. There is little evidence of a fixed acquisition order, which is the rationale for the use of phased language instruction and which is often used to repudiate the use of authentic texts for language learning.

The notion of authenticity is, secondly, embedded in prevailing language pedagogies communicative and autonomous models of learning. The emphasis in communicative language teaching on real language use begs the question of what is real, authentic, while among the choices students face in more independent language learning, are the types of texts they work with and the resources they use.

Increasingly today, these resources are electronic ones, ICT, the third current implicating the notion of authenticity. What makes the notion of authenticity such a crucial one to describe and define is its embedding in and its drawing together of these three related areas: SLA research, language pedagogy, and ICT.

Every definition of the term authentictexts is typified by this one from Morrow: An authentic text is a stretch of real language, produced by a real speaker or writer for a real audience and designed to convey a real message of some sort .

Morrow was using real as an antonym of imaginary, in other words, an authentic text is one written for the purpose of communicating information. Set in its historical context, Morrow s definition turned on the concept of purpose, so central to the communicative approach that was taking hold at that time. If interaction was to have purpose and be meaningful, it followed that the input and context had to be real or authentic .

The concept of authenticity of language use has proved somewhat less difficult to pin down than that of authenticity of text. Early on in the debate, Widdowson had made a seminal terminological distinction between the concept of authenticity and what he termed genuineness : Genuineness is a characteristic of the passage itself and is an absolute quality.

Authenticity is a characteristic of the relationship between the passage and the reader and it has to do with appropriate response. The crux of the term authenticity is that it applies not to any characteristic of the material itself, but to the interaction between the user and the text.

In other words, authenticity may be something that is realized in the act of interpretation, and may be judged in terms of the degree of participation of the learner. This concept has critical implication for the pedagogical context, where it implies that what is important is what we do with the text rather than its having occurred in a real environment.

Authenticity is not brought into the classroom with the materials or the lesson plan, rather, It is a goal that teacher and students have to work towards, consciously and constantly. Authenticity is the result of acts of authentication, by students and their teacher, of the learning process and the language used in it (Van Lier, 1996, p. 128).

The centrality of the pedagogical task is consistent with the position that the pedagogical context itself as an authentic environment. We must acknowledge that the classroom itself is a real place. It is unquestionably a reality for millions of children who spend a large portion of their childhood within one. The pedagogical situation itself is at least as authentic as that of the post office or bank so enamored of communicative dialogists. we must recognize that the classroom has its own reality and naturalness.

The arguments for the use of authentic texts for language learning are encapsulated as the 3 c s , culture, currency, and challenge. Culture, in that authentic texts incorporate and represent the culture/s of speakers of the target language; currency, in that authentic texts offer topics and language in current use, as well as those relevant to the learners; challenge, in that authentic texts are intrinsically more challenging yet can be used at all proficiency levels.

It is argued that culture and language are indivisible, any and every linguistic product of a society from a newspaper headline to a food label embodying/representing the culture. This means that it is crucial to include consciousness-raising of this cultural element in language teaching, and the only vehicles suitable for this are these very linguistic products, authentic texts. It is argued that to neglect the cultural element, or seek to neutralize it an accusation that has been levied towards the ELT course book as a genre is to present only a partial picture of the language.

This can actually inhibit language learning because it does not allow for the development of the schemata of the target language culture. i.e. Culture-specific elements vital to a command of the language. The spanner in the works of this argument is that, in the context of English as with other global languages, one language does not mean one culture. The solution to this quandary suggested here, in the context of teaching the English language and culture, is to locate it firmly in the local culture, using locally sourced authentic texts.

This section makes the next argument for the use of authentic texts for language learning and this is summarized in the term currency. In this context, as well as up-to-date-ness and topicality, the meaning of the term is expanded to encompass the advantages born of these, relevance and interest to the learners and the affective factors these imply.

Challenge makes the argument that the very feature of authentic texts that is often perceived as an impediment to their use with language learners, difficulty, is in fact an advantage. Firstly, it is argued that challenge is a positive impetus in learning and that students should not be denied interesting learning material on the basis of their proficiency level. Secondly, it is shown that difficulty is a factor not of the text used but of the task set. Finally, it is argued that in any case, suitable authentic texts can be found for all levels of learner proficiency.