Authentic Materials: How to Achieve a Sense of Authenticity in a Coursebook
First published in Business Issues 2/06, www.besig.org.
This article discusses the meaning of authentic in the context of classroom teaching and examines a particular example where a coursebook — arguably the very antithesis of authenticity — can at least achieve a sense of authenticity that makes it both interesting and credible to business people and other professional adult learners. The article refers to the course English365 (Cambridge University Press) of which Simon is a co-author.
What is 'authentic' material in the classroom? Is the use of newspapers 'authentic'? Is using a student's own notes for a prospective presentation intended for a target audience of potential customers 'authentic'?
I would argue that the answer to the last two questions is clearly 'yes'. Once the student in the second example is sufficiently well prepared to deliver a model presentation, which he/she intends to perform in a work context in the near future, then the presentation is authentic in terms of the real event — it is a practice of something imminent (and authentic).
Authenticity becomes more complicated where reading and listening materials are concerned. Arguably, the classroom compromises the authenticity of virtually any material. A sales report from a subsidiary, or a product description from a competitor, is authentic when it lands on the marketing manager's desk, but if she/he brings it into the classroom, and it becomes a study text for classroom use, its authenticity is compromised. But this does not matter one iota if the material has currency, relevance and interest for the learners concerned. We could argue the same for a newspaper article selected by the teacher, photocopied and brought to the class as raw material for reading and discussion, or vocabulary work, or whatever emerges in the not always predictable classroom. Nevertheless, the task of reading something from a newspaper or magazine would carry greater authenticity if the student brought the newspaper of his/her choice and skimmed it to find an article of particular personal interest, as opposed to reading something chosen by the teacher.
What about listening material?
Arguably the only truly authentic listening that happens in the classroom involves the once much maligned TTT (teacher talking time) or when the students talk to each other. Anything recorded onto a CD or tape and brought to the class is an artefact, all the more so if it has been directly created as a teaching aid. once sometimes hears the complaint that there is a lack of 'authentic' listening material — but discovering a ready supply of 'authentic' business/professional listening material is not easy. Most organisations — let alone individuals — would be reluctant to have their meetings, discussions, presentations, phone calls and social events recorded for classroom use by publishers, schools or teachers — and in any case most such recordings would be extremely difficult to use once devoid of context. In other words, if they are extracted from a particular time and place, and presented without the benefit of the shared knowledge of the participants, and all the other elements which help facilitate communication, they cannot carry anything like the same communicative value that they originally had. Also, the recordings, unless they use video film, would lack all visual signals, body language, realia and the sundry other elements that contribute to a communication event. Even with video, the image is selective.
Textbooks authentic? No way...
It is commonly assumed, and not without good reason, that the textbook is the least authentic thing of all — a construction generated by the combined imaginations and technical skills of authors and publishers, with perhaps input from a host of experts invited to suggest changes or new ideas at various stages in the gestation of a multi-component coursebook. The textbook is at best an extremely useful vehicle for models of good practice, exercise and reference material, language instruction, and guidance in developing communication skills, together with tips on learner training and developing autonomy. All this is highly desirable. However, it seems incontrovertible that textbook writers and publishers should also seek to retain something authentic about the products they want to market.
The first principle here is that the material should be intrinsically interesting and therefore motivating. Ideally a good textbook should reflect life, not just language. A course should, one would hope, be interesting in its own right — its content stimulating and informative. Not only that, if textbook writers could somehow convince learners that by using the course, they would learn some English, but also in a wider sense improve their overall communication skills, and be entertained at the same time, then the students' wish list would be met.
In planning English365 we talked about incorporating 'authentic listening' into the course, but in the end we had to settle for compromises which meant our best hope was to retain an authentic feel to the course as a whole, and the listening in particular. This challenge involved a great deal of detailed research and a complicated production process that made the course particularly challenging to write. In the remainder of this article I want to explain the process we undertook and argue that the end result is that the material is intrinsically interesting, motivating and relevant to a wide range of professional adult learners, whether working in private companies or other professional organisations, including services, non-governmental organisations (NGO's), international institutions, public bodies or the traditional professions.
Thematic choices and raw materials
The concern to provide an authentic feel to the course was important from the outset. We sought to identify individuals whom we knew through our professional or personal contacts who might help us with source material, and perhaps provide recordings or introductions to other people who would help us. At the same time, we thought about which contexts or themes would have real interest value and be motivating for the course users. This led us to conduct interviews with over sixty people. We recorded and then transcribed the interviews, a fairly laborious task, often running to four or five pages of transcription. We created listening extracts or developed some of the reading texts based on these interviews. This process helped us to generate a large number of interesting themes that in most cases we were able to link to specific individuals, whom we would use as the 'unit personalities'.
This produced two positive results: firstly, meaningful content and secondly, real people. So we did not have invented or fabricated content, and certainly no invented or fabricated 'people'. Mostly we used ordinary professional men and women, exactly the kinds of people that we thought our learners mighg identify with, as opposed to media stars and celebrities, although a handful of individuals we used are indeed quite well known in their respective fields.
Editing the raw material
The recordings might have given us the very authenticity that some teachers in particular appear to crave. We could, in theory, have conducted the recordings and, hey presto, there's the listening material. However, in reality this approach could not work. For one thing, the recordings we made were often at least twenty minutes long. For classroom use, short bursts of recording and certainly nothing much over three or four minutes is much more practical and pedagogically desirable. This meant a lot of selective editing by the course authors — already a compromise in terms of total authenticity.
We used a lot of non-native speakers — and why not? Most of our learners would use English to talk to other non-native speakers. This meant that there were significant numbers of 'errors' in the recordings. Furthermore they, and certainly the L1 speakers we recorded, would often use English that was overly complicated for the post-elementary to low intermediate level of our Level One, or even the two higher levels (up to high intermediate). Even more significantly, there is such a high level of natural distortion, repetition and false starts, recapitulation and downright non sequiturs in much native speech, or advanced level speech by second language speakers, that we were forced to edit the transcripts to make them suitable for our purposes. The extent to which we needed to make such editing changes varied: in some cases minimal changes were needed, perhaps a word or two changed here and there. In others, something frankly unclear or lost in a gabbled utterance might need to be reformulated. Mostly, we tried to select extracts requiring the least interference at the editing stage.
Clearly, after making even one change to an actual utterance, the recording has to be re-done. Our interviewees were not actors so we could hardly ask them to re-record on the basis of transcripts created by us, the authors. Hence recourse to professional actors, and a fine team of multilingual non-native actors as well as native speakers they were too, under expert instruction from an experienced sound production team. The result is (we think) very good — authentic sounding, if you like.
Retaining the quality of the original
As an author, I would argue that using this approach makes it a great deal easier to produce a realistic recording, indeed one that has many of the hallmarks of natural speech, including repetition, hesitation and even deviation (but to a manageable extent given our purposes) than sitting down and inventing the entire script while seated at a computer. The themes, the words and expressions used, the style of speaking that emerges in the final recordings are firmly rooted in the original interviews. The treatment of the grammar and the lexical content of the course is in large measure directly related to the original recordings. This, we believe, is a major boost to the quality of the material.
Even where the reading texts are concerned, we were able to have the final texts approved by our contacts, or their organisations. Thus the content and style has a ring of truth that purely fabricated material would almost certainly lack, even in the hands of writers more skilled than ourselves.
The acid test...
Finally we hoped that the design and appearance of the course would also add to the freshness and sense of authenticity in the course. Teachers and students using English365 will have to judge for themselves whether we have been successful in this and any other of the claims made in this article. My purpose is merely to set out what we did and to present the claim that the result has a sense of authenticity that makes this approach worthwhile. Hopefully students will find the material interesting and credible. If they do, then the complex and highly labour intensive production process involved will be justified.
With acknowledgements to Bob Dignen and Steve Flinders (English365 co-authors), and Chris Capper of Cambridge University Press.