Skip to main content

A problem with authenticity

Few language teachers would argue with the desirability of using, whenever appropriate, authentic or lightly adapted authentic listening and reading resources. In theory, they should give students an experience of hearing and seeing the language as it is actually used by native speakers and provide students with interesting materials to listen to and read. In addition, students should get less of a shock when they encounter native speaker language "in the field".

One problem which is rarely mentioned, however (apart from the obvious one, namely that authentic resources are often too difficult, therefore inappropriate), is that copyright issues mean that text books and exam boards have great difficulty sourcing them. If you have ever wondered why listening and reading texts in exam papers usually have an air of anaemic artificiality about them, it is primarily because it is really hard to get authorisation to use authentic sources. Occasionally permission is granted, but in most cases, when permission is sought, no reply is received, so writers have to assume that the source text cannot be used. This creates great difficulties for exam boards, as you can imagine, especially when the overarching authority (in England the DfE/Ofqual) are expecting students to use authentic resources.

In the real world, most teachers play fast and loose with copyright, photocopying texts and using them in class, and nobody seems to worry too much. Other teachers and writers, including myself, take authentic reading texts, then either use them as a source of information for a brand new text, or adapt them so significantly that the original text is barely recognisable. In this instance, any claim to authenticity is lost.

In any case, authenticity is probably overrated. As I have argued before in this blog, a text is a teaching tool the aim of which is to build up students' comprehension, grammatical, lexical and speaking skills. A good text is one that does this most successfully, not necessarily an authentic one. The best texts are usually at the right level of difficulty, stimulating, plausible, accurate and suitably idiomatic; they also, crucially, lend themselves to intensive controlled and communicative practice. A text may be authentic, but fail in those respects.

So, whilst I can see the value of using authentic resources whenever possible in the classroom, I would not see it as a failure if you end up using texts created for learning purposes. Part of our craft as teachers is to create, or select and adapt resources which are suitably tailored to our students' needs. It would be poor practice to just choose a resource for its authenticity rather than its suitability.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,