Authenticity and Language Teaching Materials: Texts and Tasks

Introduction: In today's class we will continue looking at the topic of authenticity in language teaching materials. Here we will focus on strategties to work with texts. The examples we will see look at written texts but most of the same strategies and concepts can be applied to listening texts as well.

Task 1: Typical Readings in Textbooks

Discuss the following questions as a group.

• How are reading activities typically presented in most commercial textbooks you have used?
• What are students asked to do before reading? 
• What are they asked to do while reading?
• What are they asked to do after reading?
• What are some strategies that books use to aid and measure students' comprehension of a text?
• What are some strategies that books use to focus on languistics aspects of a text?

Task 2: Taxonomy of Comprehension Questions

Click the link below to explore Grellet and Freeman's taxonomies. These charts show us examples of different kinds of questions and tasks we can have students respond to when working with texts.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE 

Task 3: Analyzing Texts and Tasks

Click the following links to analyze sample readings from a selection of common language textbooks. Analyze what students are asked to do in each task. How would you classify these tasks according to the taxonomies?

• Reading Samples: CLICK HERE

Task 4: More Tasks!

Maley provides us with an interesting typology of potential tasks for working with raw texts. Click the link to access the list. Read them with your partners. For each one, rate it according to its potential benefit for learners' comprehension and language development and its level of challenge.

• Maley's Typography: CLICK HERE

Now, find a textbook reading that we already looked at. How could you use Maley's typography to create additional reading tasks for your students?

Task 5: Authentic Tasks

Penny Ur in her book "A Course in Language Teaching" makes a very important point about authenticity in reading and listening. If we are using authentic texts, we should also consider whether we are asking our students to carry out authentic tasks! Reading the following extracts and discuss them with your partners.

• Authenticity of Text and Task: "With less proficient learners, we usually use simplified texts in order to make the appropriate in level for our learners; and tasks also may not represent any kind of real-life reading purpose. This is because such materials on the whole are more effective at earlier stages of learning; indeed, the use of ‘authentic’ texts with less proficient learners is often frustrating and counter-productive."

• "However, ultimately we want our learners to be able to cope with the same kinds of reading that are encountered by native speakers of the target language. As they become more advanced, therefore, it would seem sensible to start basing their reading practice on a wide variety of authentic (or near-authentic) texts, and on tasks that represent the kinds of things a reader would do with them in real life rather than on conventional comprehension exercises. Answering multiple choice questions on a poem, for example, or filling in words missing from a letter would seem a fairly irrelevant response to these types of discourse: discussing the interpretation of the poem or writing an answer to the letter would be more appropriate. Obviously completely authentic performance cannot always be provided for – we are not going to turn out classroom into a kitchen, for example, in order to respond authentically to a recipe! – but we can, and should make some attempt to select tasks that approximate to those we might do in real life." 

• Beyond Understanding: Our aims in (real-life) reading usually go beyond mere understanding. We may wish to understand something in order to learn from it (in a course of study, for example), in order to find out how to act (instructions, directions), in order to express an opinion about it (a letter requesting advice), or for many other purposes. Other pieces of writing, into which the writer has invested thought and care (literature, for example) demand a personal response from the reader to the ideas in the text, such as interpretation, application to other contexts, criticism or evaluation. Advanced reading activities should therefore see the understanding of a text only as a preliminary step on the way to further learning or other personal purposes. 

• Combining Skills: Tasks that are based on more complex thinking are likely to involve a more complex process. Also, in general, more advanced language work of any kind tends to involve longer, multi-stage activities, in order to explore to the full the opportunities to engage with the language in different ways. It is therefore very likely that activity before, during and after the reading itself will entail extended speaking, listening and writing. 

CLICK HERE to view a collection of authentic texts. What authentic tasks could you have your students do with them?