Authenticity in language learning/ teaching

By
Abdelmoughit Al assfar
Writing research project
Prof: Mercedes Dez Prados
A/Y: 2013/2014
Abstract
This paper shall question the notion of authenticity in language teaching, an issue that has attracted
significant attention among scholars and practicing teachers. The need of authentic materials in
todays learning context is not a sort of fashionable or innovative teaching; it is rather an urgent
need for our students. Exploring the nature of these authentic materials is our first point to highlight
in this paper, followed by some suggestions on how to use these materials inside the classroom with
the four skills (listening, reading, writing and speaking). The final section of the paper is dedicated
to the discussion of the possible challenges that might be found when making use of authentic
materials, accompanied by some possible amendments and solutionsfor these difficulties.
Key words: Motivation, authenticity, authentic materials, macroskills
Introduction
Motivating students, capturing their attention and interest has been one of the most
challenging tasks teachers of language have been facing. The questions on how to make them learn,
how to raise their awareness of language, and how to make their learning experience a beneficial
and enjoying experience have been asked during many years(Oura, 2003: 65). Having motivated
students is a dream that every teacher has, because teachers are all aware that motivation is one of
the key factors driving to language learning success (Dorney, 2001; Ellis, 1994 quoted inM,
Winke, 2005). To be motivated is as simple as being moved to do something (Ryan & Deci, 2000,
p. 54) Different approaches, methods, and techniques have been implemented to cover these needs
and make the most of the learning experience, if we are to list these different methods and
approaches, writing an entire book might not be enough to do so. For the scope of this paper I will
limit my focus on the authenticity in language learning, an issue that has been the main spot of
research during the last four decades; and it is considered as an important factor that might enhance
students motivation and interest of language learning (M. Winke, 2005). There havebeen many
approaches, methods and teaching strategies that try as much as possible to implement authentic
materials in the classroom, in anattempt to make the learning process of a language (English in this
case) a realistic experience and a natural one. However, the notion of authenticity in language
learning is still an arguable issue among scholars, and practitioners alike. This paper shall explore
authenticity in its different aspects, and thensuggests manners in which we can bring authenticity to
the classroom. We shall all agree on the possible difficulties that arise when dealing with teaching
approaches that differ a bit from the norms, as a final point I will try to highlight these difficulties
that may appear when bringing authenticity into practice followed by some suggestions on how to
overcome these possible problems.
1. Authentic language materials: what are they and why use them?
For many students the process of learning a language is limited with the classroom,
especially in contextswhere English for instance is a foreign language and it is not the language of
communication outside the school. If scholars claim that languagesmain function is
communication and that one learns a certain language to communicate his ideas or his feelings, then
students who are learning a foreign language in school are not very motivated enough for the only
reason that their communication needs are fulfilled with the use of their mother tongue. So why
bother themselves with learning a language that has an exclusive and limited use? For many
students they complain that all what they do in a class is a set of artificial tasks and activities
lacking all sortsof authenticity and real useof language (Taylor, 1994)
Authenticity in language learning or authentic materials are a set of texts or recordings
produced by real speakers or real writers for a real audience to convey a real messageor meaning
(Morrow, 1977: 13). Harmer (1983:146) defined authentic materials as texts (written or spoken)
which are designedfor native speakers, with a focus on the learners of that language who are
English, American or Australian when dealing with English language. While Wilkins (1976)
agreed on the same definition as harmer, Nunan (1989: 54) claimed that authentic materials are all
sorts of resources that were not designed for language teaching. Although, these definitions might
have some slice differences in terms of content, they shall all be categorized under the umbrella of
communicative approach to language learning. An approach that has been adopted in language
teaching during the last four decades, its philosophy is based on seeing language far more than a
system of rules; rather it considers language to be a dynamic resource for the creation of meaning.
Language in this sense is the ability of its learners to distinguish between knowing various
grammatical rules and using those rules effectively and appropriately when communicating (Nunan,
1989: 12). This approach, according to Harmer (1983), has made a significant shift not only on
what to teach, but also on the way of teaching, he suggested that the communicative approach
includes the use of activities that wouldinvolve students on real or realistic communication where
much importance is given to the fluency of the learners rather than their accuracy. A context that is
similar to a situation in real life and the achievement of successful communication is the end point.
Another approach where authenticity can take place is the task based approach popularized by N
Prabhu who speculated that learners can equally learn a language if they were thinking about a non-
linguistic problem to solve as when they were concentrating on particular language form (Prabhu,
1987 quoted inHarmer, 2011: 86). He goes further in his explanation by giving an example of what
task based learning can be, suggesting that instead of asking students, for instance, about (e.g. what
is this? Its a time table, or what does arrival mean?) Students ask and answer questions to solve a
problem such as finding train timetable information; therefore the questions would be (e.g. when
does the Brindavan express leave Madras/ arrive in Bangalore?).
These are two examples, among many others, of approaches that make use of authenticity in
language learning, with a set of different activities and materials which we shall give note of later
on in this paper. But before doing so, let us first explore some examples of what classroom
materials can be authentic or rather serve for authenticity. Hover (1986, quoted inNunan, 1989: 53)
suggests a long list of these materials; within this list we can here mention the following:
Letters ( formal/informal)
news paper extracts
picture stories
memo notes
shopping lists
post cards,
family trees
menus
recipe
weather forecast
diary
hotel entertainment programs
The list of course isnot complete, nor holistic, for the time being I might extend this list so as to
make it up to date and include the use of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram)
movies, and TV series as fundamental resources for authentic materials. In this regard, the elements
of the above list of materials beside my own extension are the range of data sources that exist all
around us (Nunan, 1989: 53).
Clarke & Silberstein (1977) argued that classroom activities should parallel the real world as
closely as possible. Due to the fact that language should serve as a means of communication,
methods and materials should focus more on the massage rather than the medium. The four skills,
they claim, shall have similar purposes when done in class as it is the case outside the classroom. A
reading task, for instance, should consist of obtaining specific facts or piece of information
(scanning), then obtain a holistic ideaof the text (skimming), grasp the whole meaning of the text in
what is considered to be a thorough comprehension, finally criticize, evaluate the text and decide
whether it fits to ones own beliefs, and that is critical reading (Nunan, 1989: 59).
Nowadays the use of authentic materials is of crucial importance, since they provide
stimulating texts, recordings, visuals and contexts of speaking full of cultural information for a
range of students that have different styles, and varied interests. Doff (1988: 170) argued that when
students are presented such kind of appropriate materials, they get interested because their view to
those materials changed from being a merely tool of learning the language to a means of obtaining
information. In addition to this, authentic materials provide the opportunity for students to be
exposed to some incidental or improper language, elements that are not normally found in text
books. A sense of satisfaction is also created when students listentoor read authentic materials
since they feel that their language is being improved and useful inthe outside world (Mabc& LLG,
n.d). A question that imposesitself at this stage is the way we can present those materials and bring
them to the classroom, what authentic materials are appropriate for some students and not for
others? The following section of my paper shall explore this issue, and analyze the best way we can
bring authenticity to our language classes.
2. The use of Authentic Materials inside the classroom:
In the first section of this paper, I have tried to define what authenticity is and which
materials can be considered authentic in a language classroom. A list of real materials that surround
us every day was presented in an attempt to provide practical examples. The focus on this section
shall be on the means and the manners in which we can bring those materials to a language class in
the four macroskills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing.
a. Authenticity in listening:
Listening is one of the most frequently used skills in our learning process, when students
first start learning a language they have to start listening to the sounds, recognize some words, build
their vocabulary, develop their language use and proficiency (Barker, 1971, quoted inThanajaro,
2000: 2) However, this skill is rarely developed inside the classroom, and little importance has been
given to this skill, since teachers believe that it is a skill that can beacquired and improved naturally
and there is no need to dedicate too much time for it. While this belief is still nowadays spread
among many teachers, Dunkel (1986) Curtain & Pesola (1988) argued that the listening skill is the
key to achieving the proficiency in speaking and it is the main channel through which students
make direct contact with the language and the culture (Ibid, 2000: 2). If we are to believe that the
listening skill is as fundamental as the rest of the skills, we should then think of ways in which we
can develop this skill. Maybe one of the reasons why students are not motivated when having a
listening task is the irrelevance of the recording in terms of its form and content. Finding
appropriate and lively materials are the key factor to arise some sort of interest in the listening
activity. If carefullyand effectively chosen, authentic materials have this ability to move students
and grasp their attention to the listening task as they expose students to real language, when I say
real I do not claim that the rest of language in the classroom is not real, rather I only try to
highlight the difference between a conversation, for instance, that takes place in a real radio
program, and a piece of it that was made exclusively for academic purposes. A research conducted
by Herron and Seay (1991) found that students who listened to authentic radio tapes as an
alternative for regular listening activities showed greater comprehension than those whose listening
tasks didnt include authentic recordings, their conclusion indicated that listening-comprehension
skill improveswith exposure to authentic materials (Ibid, 2000:35). This conclusion makes sense if
we explore what can be the difference between authentic and inauthentic materials. In an authentic
context speakers tend to say a great deal of words more than necessary, repeat words in what is
known as redundancy, a feature that appearsless in inauthentic recordings. An element that might
takes the form of false starts, rephrasing, self-correction, elaborations, meaningless addition, or fills
such as you know, I mean, well, erras well as a tendency to go back in the conversation and start
the idea again, hesitate and all sorts of ungrammatical utterances etc( Ur, 1984) Exposing
students to this sort of materials allows some kind of confidence in the use of language later, makes
them aware that language is not that perfect utterance which should respect all the grammatical
forms and linguistic restrictions, it rather naturalizes the language for them and above all, these
materials transmit, as they are by their nature, a culturally rich context.
b. Authenticity in reading:
Reading activity is a very rich context where we can make the most of authentic materials, it
offers students a significant opportunity to explore the language in its real feature, without any
bridging, nor deletion or modification. When we read in real life, we are interested in the
communicative purpose of the text; we want to tackle the wit of the written piece, its humor and its
cultural aspects. This can be easily noticed if we compare a piece of written text in a text book and
another one in a book, a magazine or a newspaper. In a normal classroom setting, we tend to have a
text book which we should finish by the end of the semester or the year, one of the drawbacksof
text books isthat they dont normally contain authentic reading texts, rather modified, bridged and
adapted. A way to improve students reading skills and motivate them is bringing supplementary
authentic materials such as stories, books, and articles from newspapers and magazines, without
forgetting about internet-based materials bearing in mind their interests, their level of proficiency
and their ages. Our main purpose behind exposing students to these authentic materials should be
preparing them for the real life reading situations, where we do not normally read aloud, we have
little help, we should not understand every single word, and furthermore we read as an end and not
as a medium. Therefore, authentic reading materials shall enhance students autonomy and
confidence; as well as teaching them to be critical in their reading (Neikova, 2005). The last thing,
which is actually the first step, when assigning these authentic materials three elements should be
taken into consideration; its readability which means that the text should be at the right level of the
students, although the text might be difficult the tasks shall be adapted and not necessarily the text.
Then its suitability of content in terms of interest and information that should meet the needs of the
students, and finally its exploitability in a way that the text should develop the reading skills of the
students in order to become competent and independent readers (Ibid, 2005).
c. Authenticity in speaking :
Until the 1960s, language proficiency was considered as a mastery of grammatical
structures. The shift started in Great Britain when linguistsbeganto question the assumptions
underscoring Situational Language Teaching; therefore, an emphasis was given to the
communicative proficiency (Basta, 2011). The speaking skill has been given little importance in
language classrooms, and it has occupied a peculiar position throughout much of the history of
language teaching, only in the last 20 years that it has begun to emerge as a branch of teaching,
learning and testing in its own right (Bygate, 2001). We have started to notice a focus on the
speaking skills in many textbooks, an element that marks a significant improvement or a better
understanding of the importance of this skill. The questions that emerge here is whether we have
achieved an improvement concerning the speaking performance of our students? Whether these
textbooks activities provide our students with authentic speaking tools and authentic speaking
situations? When we are dealing with speaking activities, students start to tremble and teachers
alike do so, the first for fear of having to face a very uncomfortable situation, and the second for
fear of wasting time in carrying an activity which normally leads to a great waste of time and hardly
tangible results. Why speaking is uncomfortable, when our students spend most of their time
chatting with each other during the classroom. And why speaking is a waste of time, if the main aim
behind learning a language is to acquire the communicative abilities of that language and being
capable of speakingout onesownthoughts and feelings. Maybe repeating drillsand memorizing
dialogues are not the best way in which we can initiate and rise up our students interest and
motivation in speaking a language.
If speaking, as (Chaney, 1998) defines it, is a process of building and sharing meaning through the
use of verbal and non-verbal symbols in a variety of contexts, our approaches of repeating others ideas and
communicating them go against what speaking is, and its main purpose. In a rapidly changing world, we
should prepare our students to face the outside world and teach them how to speak up their own voices.
Authenticspeaking activities are they key of reflecting reality inside the classroom, a session of free
discussion about topics that interest my students, the pros and cons of Whatsupp mobile application, would
have far greater results than speaking about the investment in space for instance; first because everybody
have Whatsupp, and it is a topic that would arise the curiosity of almost all the students, secondly, because it
is a topic that affects them directly and the discussion might lead to some practical ideas that might be
applied after the class, or at least might make students think about them. Space investment is not a topic of
lower importance; rather it is an issue that hardly raises the interest of the students. Stimulation activities are
very motivating and create an authentic environment for learning and speaking. Another way of making
speaking sound authentic is as simple as speaking with students about their lives, questions such as, how are
you today? What have you done this weekend? How are the preparations of your exams going? have a great
potential in establishing a real use of language and not only motivate students to use the language, but also
create a friendly and stress- free atmosphere of learning.
Speaking as a communicative skill can be a great element to make the best of authenticity in
language learning. It has this ability of being used and exploited during the whole classroom, so there is not a
specific moment of speaking tasks, or Okay, now lets do a little bit of speaking. Speaking must take place
from the very beginning of a class until its end.
d. Authenticity in writing:
When it comes to writing it seems very difficult to make the experience authentic, because
as White (1981: 2) argues, writing is not a natural activity since all physically and mentally normal
people learn to speak a language, yet all people have to be taught how to write. Bell and Burnaby
(1984, quoted in Nunan, 1989: 36) point out that writing is an extremely complex cognitive activity
in which the writer has to demonstrate a set of variables simultaneously, such as content, format,
sentence structure, vocabulary and punctuation etcBeing able to write fluently and expressively
Nunan (1989) argues that it is the most difficult of the macroskills, regardless of whether you are
writing in your first, second or foreign language.
Having tackled the difficulty of this skill, more reasons arise to pay due attention to the
teaching of writing, motivation should be our mainconcern and our first goal to achieve among
students. A motivated student would always come up with a well done piece of writing, although it
might not be perfectly written, but the learning to write will take place. As we have seen before in
this paper, students tend to be motivated when they feel engaged in the learning process, and this
engagement happens when the learning materials and the tasks students have to accomplish reflect
in a way their interests and preferences. Authentic writing has this potential of providing students
with situations where the writing process is nothing else but a chance and opportunity to express
themselves, their feelings, their thoughts and opinions.
We normally tend to ask our students to write different sorts of topics in different formats,
both chosen by us, or by the textbook, but we rarely give them this freedom of writing about
whatever they want in the way they want, with some guiding of course, so as writing for them
becomes a source of speaking out their views and opinions on whatever they consider important for
them. This happens mainly out of fear to have a decontrol of everything in our classrooms, but we
never think that this way might be the most motivating for our students. If this approach sounds
extreme, there are other manners in which we can make use of authenticity without losing control,
for example; by making them write about their experiences and not opine on others, which was
your best or worse holiday ever? Have you ever been to a foreign country and got lost? We can also
ask them to write their diaries and share them in the classroom. Concerning email writing which is a
task that everybody has done in school, a simple way of making it look authentic is by using real
email addresses and using computers instead of paper sheets to write them. We might also
encourage students to watch a movie then write about its plot, their favorite character and also their
criticism about the movie. We shall never forget that writing is not an activity in its own right,
independent and unrelated with the three other skills; they all tend to function together and
complement each other. A writing task might be the result of a discussion a class carried out before,
a radio program students listened to, an article of a newspaper they read. Writing in this sense is a
natural reaction to different materials our students get exposed to.
Authentic writing shall not be the exception or a revolutionary way of dealing with this skill,
but a norm that can be adopted by all teachers, and syllabus designers so as to demolish all the fear
our students have towards writing, a fear that accompany them during all their study career. The
weird demands and exigencies that we, teachers, tend to ask our students when writing are
creativity and authenticity. The logical thing and the common sense all teachers share, is the
principle of giving something, and then ask for it, and not asking for things we never give, or at
least never show them where they are.
3. The challenges of using authentic materials in the classroom:
Bringing authentic materials to the classroom is something out of the norm; it implies
leaving apart the textbook and creates ones own activities. This extra task takes the teacher out of
his/her comfort zone, it involves more preparation; therefore, moreefforts. When teachers choose to
use authentic materials they should be very careful in selecting level appropriate materialsand
linguistically profitable ones (Allwright 1990: 136, cited by Pegrum, 2000). The factor of time
makes this task quite challenging in two different levels, first, the choice of the appropriate moment
to introduce these materials into the classroom, second, the issue of time consumption that such
activities might require from the teacher in terms of research and preparation, and since authentic
materials are related with the outside world, a fact that makes them ever changing and quickly
outdated, obliges teachers to be constantly renewing their materials and hunting for new topics and
issues, especially when it comes to reading news articles or watching TV programs ( Georgieva,
n.d). Some materials, for being authentic, are very difficult for learners and might contain a lot of
new and unfamiliar vocabulary, as well as complex grammatical structures, and this in a way can be
demotivating and frustrating for students.
In order to avoid, or at least lessen from these drawbacks, teachers can make a list of
adaptations to these authentic materials. They can addcertain grammatical structures or vocabulary
if teachers feel the need for further exposureto these linguistic elements. Deletion of irrelevant
content is also possible whenever teachers consider it helpful and appropriate, modifying and
simplifying authentic materials is a process that contributes in making the most of themespecially
when the level of students is not high enough to understand the content of some texts or recordings
(Mabc& LLG, n.d). This process of adaptation is not, by no means, depriving these materials from
their authenticity; it is rather a process that makes possible the use of authentic materials in all
levels with all kind of students. While speaking about modification and adaptation, materials are not
always the target of these processes; teachers can adapt the activities and the exercises
accompanying the materials and make them appropriate for their students level without the need of
changing or modifying the original materials.
4. Conclusion:
The issue of authenticity in the classroom cannot be seen as a revolution against the norms,
or as an approach that tries to ridicule textbooks. The concern of every teacher is to have motivated
students in the classroom, students willing to learn and interested in what they are learning, but we
should never forget that authenticity is not an approach that can be exploited only inside the
classroom, teachers might encourage their students to listen to radio podcasts, movies in original
versions, songs etc The internet has made it such an easy task for all of us to search for and
obtain these materials. In my paper I have made clear what scholars mean by authentic materials, I
have given practical examples of these materials, then tried to show in which way we can make use
of them in our language classes; however, I also tackled the difficulty of the approach, and how
challenging these materials can result both for teachers and students. Conducting a successful
language classroom is not conditioned by the use of this approach or that one, authentic materials, if
not carefully selected and well prepared, might have disastrous results. This paper doesnt claim at
any moment the perfectness of this approach neither it claimed any sort of mathematical results of
success. A good approach to language teaching is rather conditioned by a good teacher, and a good
learning atmosphere. Successful teachers are those teachers whom I tend to call, teachers a la carte,
teachers that adapt their strategies and their approaches to the needs of their students, teachers that
find out how they can motivate their students and what is best for their learning. Using authentic
materials in the classroom is not the obligation of the century; it is the personal choice of every
single teacher that might consider this approach fits into his classroom.
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