A further distinction is between authentic and non-authentic language. Here is the opening dialogue from New English File (Oxenden et al., 2004):
A: Hi. I’m Tom. What’s your name? B: Anna.
A: Sorry? B: Anna!
This is non-authentic language specially constructed for its teaching potential. People in real-life conversations do not speak in full grammatical sentences and
do not keep to a clear sequence of turns. Nor do they tend to go up to complete strangers and introduce themselves, except in certain socially sanctioned situations (speed-dating?).
Instead they speak like these two people, recorded while talking about ghosts for my coursebook English Topics (Cook, 1975):
Mrs Bagg: Oh, how extraordinary.
Jenny Drew: So…‘cos quite a quite a lot of things like that. Mrs Bagg: I mean were they frightened? ‘Cos I think if I actually… Jenny Drew: No.
Mrs Bagg: …saw a ghost because I don’t believe in them really, I would be frightened, you know to think that I was completely wrong.
This is an example of authentic language, defined by David Little et al. (1988) as language ‘created to fulfil some social purpose in the language community in which it was produced’. Until recently, teaching provided the students with spe- cially adapted language, not only simplified in terms of syntax and confined in vocabulary, but also tidied up in terms of discourse structure. The belief was that such non-authentic language was vital to L2 learning.
With the advent of methods that looked at the communicative situations the students were going to encounter, it seemed clear that the students were handi- capped by never hearing authentic speech in all its richness and diversity. Hence exercises and courses have proliferated that turn away from specially constructed classroom language to pieces of language that have really been used by native speakers, whether tapes of conversations, advertisements from magazines, train timetables, or a thousand and one other sources. In most countries it is possible to use authentic texts based on local circumstances taken from local English-lan- guage newspapers, such as the Jerusalem Post or the Buenos Aires Herald, often available from the Internet these days, for example the Athens News, the Straits
Times (Singapore) or Granma (Havana).
Two justifications for the use of authentic text in communicative teaching are put forward by Little et al. (1988):
● Motivation and interest. Students will be better motivated by texts that have
served a real communicative purpose.
● Acquisition-promoting content. Authentic texts provide a rich source of natu-
ral language for the learner to acquire language from. Additional reasons are:
● Filling in language gaps. Designers of coursebooks and syllabuses may miss
some of the aspects of language used in real-life situations; we often do not know what people actually say in railway stations or offices. This lack can be filled most easily by giving students the appropriate real-life language taken from situations appropriate to their needs.
● Showing L2 users in action. While it may be hard for the teacher or course-
book writer to imitate L2 users, authentic L2-use texts can do this readily, for example, the English-speaking newspapers mentioned above.
The fact that the language is authentic does not in itself make it more difficult than specially written language. Difficulty depends partly on the amount of material that is used. A BBC Russian course recorded people on the streets of Moscow saying ‘Zdravstvujte’ (Hello) to the cameraman – totally authentic, but no problem for the students. The recording or text does not have to consist of many words to be authentic: ‘EXIT’, ‘This door is alarmed’, ‘Ladies’, to take three authentic written signs. Difficulty also depends on the task that is used with the material. You can play a recording of two philosophers discussing the nature of the universe to beginners so long as all you ask them to do is identify which is a man, which a woman, or who is angry, who is calm, or indeed who said ‘well’ most often.
It is up to the teacher whether authentic language should be used in the class- room or whether non-authentic language reflects a legitimate way into the lan- guage. In other words, the choice is between decoding and codebreaking: are the processes of learning similar to those of use, so that authentic language is needed, or are they different, so that appropriate non-authentic language is helpful? Other factors involved in this decision will be the goals of the students and other con- straints of the teaching situation. And of course, the classroom is a classroom; authentic language, by definition, is not normal classroom language and is being used for purposes quite other than those of its original speakers, however well intentioned the teacher.
One problem is that many teachers still think of an L2 class as language practice above all else, not related to ‘real’ communication – mock communica- tion disguising language teaching points or tasks. If the student’s answer leads away from the language point that is being pursued, it is ignored, however promising the discussion might seem. Seldom does genuine communication take place in which the students and teacher develop a communicative exchange leading away from the language teaching point. Yet one of the early claims of the direct method pioneers was that genuine interchange of ideas was possible in the classroom. Lambert Sauveur boasted that he could give a beginners’ class on any topic; when challenged to give a class on God, he succeeded brilliantly (Howatt, 2004). The IRF exchange, particularly the teacher’s evaluation move, is a constant reminder to the students that they are engaged in language practice, not use.