Authentic materials

NINE ELEMENTS OF AUTHENTIC LEARNING:

1.Provide authentic contexts that reflect the way the knowledge will be used in real life .

2.Provide authentic tasks and activities .

3.Provide access to expert performances and the modelling of processes .

4.Provide multiple roles and perspectives.

5.Support collaborative construction of knowledge .

6.Promote reflection to enable abstractions to be formed .

7.Promote articulation to enable tacit knowledge to be made explicit.

8.Provide coaching and scaffolding by the teacher at critical times.

9.Provide for authentic assessment of learning within the tasks.

Authentic materials are an excellent resource in any teaching context. Sometimes educators work at institutions that provide lots of materials, while others may only provide a few or none at all. How to incorporate authentic materials depends on each teacher’s preference and teaching situation. Materials can supplement an existing curriculum or textbook or can even serve as the basis for an entire course.

For instance, perhaps a textbook provides a unit on the simple past tense with practice dialogues and exercises for students to complete. An instructor could use different news clips or articles in English to have students apply what they learned about the simple past tense. Learners could watch the clips or read articles in small groups, and then use the simple past tense to write a summary of the news event to present to the class. A teacher might choose to use this type of activity regularly, perhaps as a weekly news overview that allows students to practice different targeted grammatical structures by presenting the news to classmates.

BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES OF USING AUTHENTIC MATERIALS

Using authentic materials can have benefits and challenges just like any other instructional resource. However, with careful consideration, educators can find materials that benefit students and minimize potential difficulties.

Authentic materials are beneficial because they show a real-world use of language and often present content that is of high interest to students. Most authentic materials present current topics in news or culture or help students learn information that is useful in their everyday lives. For this reason, using authentic materials often increases students’ motivation and willingness to take risks with English.

Real materials, unlike materials made specifically for teaching, are not created with certain grammatical structures or vocabulary in mind. Instead they provide an opportunity for students to read or hear language as it is used in a real-life situation. This can help advance students’ language learning by exposing them to new vocabulary and grammatical concepts in a meaningful way.

There are possible challenges when using authentic materials for English instruction. Some time-dependent resources like news stories or social media posts can quickly become outdated. Although these items may work well in a current course, they may not be useful at a later time.

Some materials can pose a challenge for beginner or even intermediate students. English language learners may have trouble with vocabulary and grammar structures in materials created for a fluent audience. To address this challenge, teachers have to plan thoughtful ways for students to interact with these materials.

SELECTING AUTHENTIC MATERIALS

Using the definition from this month’s Introduction, we think about authentic materials as any materials that use language to communicate information and meaning (Thomas, 2014). This description opens up a wealth of possible resources, most of which are free and easily accessible on the internet or perhaps in our everyday lives.

There are some key questions to consider when selecting authentic materials to use with your students:

What concept, skill, or language structure will students practice? How do I want my students to be able to use language, and how will this resource help them learn or practice? • What is the language proficiency level of my students? What support will they need in order to access the content of the materials?

What topics are interesting to my students?

Do my students interact with English in their everyday lives? If so, in what contexts or settings do they use English? If not, what types of materials can I incorporate into instruction to motivate them to use English outside of the classroom?

Thinking about the answers to these questions will help you select materials that will allow students to practice targeted language skills, interact with English in a meaningful and relevant way, and maintain a high level of interest and motivation.

Here again is the list of some authentic resources that can be used for instruction, also shared in the introduction:

TV shows, news segments, documentaries, movie clips and trailers, online videos, and commercials

Radio broadcasts, songs, and podcasts

Photographs, artwork, signs, postcards, maps, and advertisements

Magazines, letters and emails, news articles, brochures, websites, blogs, and social media posts

Recipes, food labels, bus and train schedules, menus, and price tags and product descriptions

Using authentic materials is one of the mainstays of an imaginative and motivating higher level course, but rarely features at levels lower than intermediate.

Using authentic materials - resources article

There are several reasons for this, primarily a kind of fear that students will panic when faced with language that is largely unfamiliar, and a feeling that to prevent this the language should be edited to the students' level. This is an unnecessary fear, as using authentic materials can be rewarding and stimulating for both teacher and students.

Sources

Aren't authentic materials too difficult?

An example

When people first think of authentic materials they usually assume that we are talking about newspaper and magazine articles. However, the term can also encompass such things as songs, web pages, radio & TV broadcasts, films, leaflets, flyers, posters, indeed anything written in the target language and used unedited in the classroom.

The materials used, will of course, depend on the 'usual' factors:

topic

target language area

skills

students' needs and interests

It's no good trying to get your students fascinated by a text on the latest art movie if they are all fans of action films. You might as well save your time and energy and just use the text book!

Aren't authentic materials too difficult?

Yes they are, but that's the point! Your text, written or recorded, is likely to be too hard, even, in some cases, for advanced students. The trick, regardless of the text used, is not to edit and grade the text, but to grade the task according to your students' abilities. This is for three reasons: most importantly, it reflects the kind of situation your students may face in an English-speaking environment, it saves you time and energy (more of an added bonus than a reason) and lastly it encourages and motivates your students when they can 'conquer' a real text.

An example

The same text could be used in a variety of different ways. Let us take a tourist information leaflet. This kind of authentic material has the added advantage that it can be easily and swiftly ordered for free and in multiple copies from tourist boards and agencies. This also removes issues of copyright, which is a common problem of using authentic materials and should be checked depending on your particular situation. (Some countries allow a small number of copies to be made for educational purposes, but this can vary.)

With a little pre-teaching a low level class can use the leaflet to find out key information, 'What is the telephone number for..?' or 'When is..?' and so on.

At higher levels the same text could be used together with similar or related texts to form part of a research project (in this case, web sites, posters and similar leaflets spring to mind).

The question of levels

Naturally certain texts will lend themselves more easily to certain levels.

At lower levels some possibilities include leaflets, timetables, menus, short headline type reports, audio and video advertising, or short news broadcasts. The task should be simple and relatively undemanding, and it is important to pre-teach key vocabulary so as to prevent panic.

At more intermediate levels this list could be expanded to include longer articles, four or five minute TV or radio news reports, a higher quantity of shorter items, or even whole TV programmes, if your copyright agreements allow it. Again pre-teaching is important, although your students should be able to deal with unknown vocabulary to some extent.

At higher levels it's a case of anything goes. At an advanced level students should have some tactics for dealing with new vocabulary without panicking, but it's still useful to have a few quick definitions to hand for some of the trickier stuff!

Dealing with unknown language

As can be seen, a key skill here is dealing with unknown language, in particular vocabulary. It is hard to cover this topic here, as there are several methods, although one which seems immediately appropriate is the skill of ignoring it, if they can complete the task without it!

Especially with lower levels, it needs to be emphasised that students do not have to understand everything. I've found that students don't often believe you until you go through a few tasks with them. Teaching them this skill, and developing their confidence at coping with the unknown is an important element in their development as independent learners.

Conclusion

As can be seen, using authentic materials is a relatively easy and convenient way of improving not only your students' general skills, but also their confidence in a real situation. This is only a brief introduction to the ideas involved, but some of these ideas could easily be expanded to form part of a motivating and effective course.

  Textbooks=Boring

I’ve talked about how I don’t really like to use textbooks that much and if possible, I’ll design my own lessons. A big part of this is that I think most of the topics in ESL textbooks are overdone and the students (and myself) are bored of them, especially at the higher-levels when students have been studying English for 10+ years.

Textbooks=Not Real Life

Another reasons is that I think it’s better for students to get practice with “real-life” stuff. You know, the stuff that they would encounter out in the real world. Isn’t this the goal of most of our classes anyway-preparing students for life, outside the classroom?

Authentic Materials for Lower-Level Students?

Authentic materials are useful because they give students confidence that they can function in English in an authentic kind of way and I also like them because it’s “real” language as opposed the artificial stuff that you’ll often find in textbooks (especially the bad ones). They can also push students to learn some new vocabulary that you often can’t find in the textbooks.

Of course it’s possible (and necessary!) to use authentic materials for language learning with higher-level students, but is it possible for intermediate or beginner students? My answer: yes, kind of. I’ll explain more about what I mean.

Low-Level Students: Choose Authentic Materials Carefully

Careful selection of authentic materials is needed so that the students don’t become frustrated. Nothing is worse than choosing something that is higher-level than your students actually are. If you choose something easier, it’s possible to adapt it on the fly to make it harder, but it’s very hard to do this with something that is too high of a level.

I remember back when I was taking a Korean class and the teacher brought in an article for us to read. I quite literally knew only about 10% of the vocab on the page. It was the most painful hour of my life and I felt like my head was going to explode. My general rule is that most of the students in the class should know at least 70% of the vocab or it’s too difficult. The top students will probably know 80-90%, which is okay.

Lower-Level Students: Some Ideas for Authentic Materials

For lower-level students something like a restaurant menu, greeting card, or “kids” newspaper from an English-speaking country is definitely possible and will be simple enough for them. The language is usually not so complex and more of a vocabulary challenge than a grammar one.

For intermediate-level students, you have a wider range of choices including short newspaper articles that deal with “facts,” as opposed to “opinions,” teen fiction, or simple TED talks (non-native English speakers are a good choice usually because they’ll speak more slowly and use less slang).

Semi-Authentic Materials: Not a Bad Choice

If your students are not at a high enough level to use authentic materials, you could venture into the realm of semi-authentic materials (very suitable for low-intermediate levels). My favorite site for these kinds of materials is Breaking News English. The articles are categorized into easier/harder and they 2-page mini lessons are extremely teacher (and student) friendly and are perfect for a 1-2 hour class. It’s almost hard to believe that all this stuff is free!