Bridging the Gap Between the Classroom and the Real World

“Bridging the gap between the classroom and the real world”

Using authentic texts in the Languages Classroom

Wei Qu and Kathy Purvis

1Introduction

This paper is part of the research for a PhD thesis on the use of authentic texts in the Languages classroom. It is based on the collaboration of the researcher working with a non-native speaker Chinese teacher and her class of 10 Year 11/12 continuers students at a large metropolitan government high school in Adelaide. The data was collected over a period of eleven weeks and includes student feedback in response to the authentic texts used.

The first part of this paper looks at aspects of what constitutes an authentic textand the reasons for using authentic texts in second language teaching. The second part describes the specific authentic texts that were chosen for this unit of work and how they were adapted. The following sections describe the teaching and learning process of how the texts were used in the classroom and analyse students’ work and feedback to two surveys about their experiences of engaging with these authentic resources.

2Authentic texts and authentic texts use in second language classroom

Nunan (1988) claims that authentic materials “reflect the outside world” and “have been produced for purposes other than to teach language” (p. 99). Little, Devitt and Singleton (1988) suggest authentic texts are “substitutes for the community of native speakers within which ‘naturalistic’ language acquisition occurs”. In other words, a text in general is considered as textually authentic if it is written or spoken for real-life communication rather than being composed for teaching purposes.

The use of authentic resources in the language classroom has become common in recent decades. Little, Devitt and Singleton (1988) claim that authentic texts should occupy an essential role in language learning. The purpose of using authentic texts, oral or written, in the language class is to enhance students’ understanding of meaning and communication in the target language. Authentic texts which provide social purpose, linguistic items, cultural understanding and authentic natural language help students “bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world”(Guariento & Morley 2001).Inthe second language classroom it is important that the authentic texts should be appropriate to learners’ second language proficiency, social needs and their previous knowledge and experiences, as well as “to the realities of communication in the target language community” (Little, Devitt & Singleton 1988).

Lee (1995, p. 325) believes that “textually authentic materials are not inherently learner authentic”. Learner authenticity involves learners being able to positively perceive and respond to the materials appropriately (Lee 1995). Authentic texts may play an unauthentic role when texts are too difficult and students perceive and respond to the materials as merely assessment tasks and cannot respond to the communicative purpose of the text. As a result, authentic texts may prevent learners from interacting with the text in a meaningful way, frustrate and demotivate learners in language learning (Guariento & Morley 2001). In order to eliminate this possibility, authentic texts need to be carefully chosen or modified for language teaching in accordance with learners’ language proficiency. In adapting the resources, teachers need to ensure the following aspects are maintained.(Liddicoat et al. 2003, p. 67):

Authenticity of purpose: / the resource needs to be intrinsically of interest or there needs to be an extrinsic purpose (as in the case of maps, menus, etc.) if it is to engage learners
Authenticity of task: / Learners need to respond to the resource in an authentic way, thus what they are asked to do with a resource is at least as important as its origin
Authenticity of conditions: / The conditions for intercultural language use need to reflect the conditions for use of the resource in the ‘real world’.

3Choice of authentic texts

Three different kinds of texts were created and collected for the unit of work. They included a set of letters from a group of students in China, a job advertisement from a local business owner and a variety of short job advertisements taken from the windows of businesses in Adelaide’s China Town.

3.1 The letters

The Chinese students who wrote these letters were from a boarding school in a country town which is the researcher’s hometown. They wrote the letters in January 2013, five months before they took university enrolment exams. They volunteered to write the letters talking about their hopes and plans for the future. They were aware that their letters would be read by Australian students about their own age and were asked to write simple Chinese. They were given no other direction about how to write their letters or what to say. Since students’ access to computers and the internet at that school was strictly controlled and these students hardly used Email, the letters were written by hand, and a student scanned all the letters and sent them to the researcher when he returned home for Chinese New Year.

3.2The job advertisements

Two different types of authentic job advertisements were provided to the students. The authentic job advertisements were collected in different ways. Photos of five short advertisements were taken in Adelaide’s China Town by the researcher. A complete job advertisement, to which students replied by writing an application letter and CV , was sourced from a Russian/Asian food stall in Adelaide Central Market owned by a Chinese person who is the researcher’s friend. All these advertisements were written by native Chinesespeakers looking for Chinese employees in Adelaide, an English speaking environment in which both writers and readers communicate in English as a second language as well as Chinese. Some English words were written in the advertisements. It is the authentic language of Chinese speakers living and working in Australia and is slightly different from the Chinese language used in China.

Each of the short advertisements was less than 30 words. Since these advertisements were put up in the windows of restaurants, contact details and work place were not mentioned, which was different from the formal job advertisement. The students read these five short advertisements without any adaptation or vocabulary list. In the real world language users use different words to express the same meaning. From these authentic short advertisements, the students were able to learn different expressions from those in the textbook. They had learned expressions such as 招聘(employ), 广告(advertisement), 有意者请电(if you are interested, please call) and so on in their textbook. However, the word 招聘appears in only one advertisement while the other four advertisements used 诚聘(sincerely employ) and招(employ). Because these advertisements were put up on the windows of the restaurants, the language used is less formal than that in newspaper and internet advertisements.

The complete advertisement was originally used to look for new employees on the website adelaidebbs. It was adapted by changing some of the criteria and also by adding an introduction to the stall and a photo of the stall and the stall owner

4 Teaching and Learning with authentic texts.

The authentic texts described above were designed to complementa unit of work for Term 1 which had already been planned by the teacher. The unit of work was based on the themes, Education and Aspirations and The World of Work.

The first summative assessment task was a one on one discussion with the teacher about future plans and career options. The letters about future career options and aspirations from final year students at a Chinese High School provided by the researcher were the first set of authentic texts to be used as part of the preparation for this task. As these texts became available after the unit of work had been planned it was decided to use them as one of a series of formativeactivities which scaffolded students’ learning and prepared them for the task.

Students’ first task was to read two texts from the textbook on which the unit of work was based, Hanyu for Intermediate Students Stage 3, Chapter 6. Scarino and Liddicoat (2009, p. 63)talk about the ‘constrained nature of resources’ such as those presented in textbooks and how ‘information is usually presented in a way which strips away the complexity, variability and subtlety of culture and represents speakers of target language as homogeneous’. From a teacher’s perspective there are some advantages of using these kinds of materials. The two texts from the textbook were a useful introduction to students because they were written purposely to expose students to relevant vocabulary and grammatical structures that they might need to talk about their own careers and future hopes and aspirations at a level commensurate with their language ability.

After students had learnt the vocabulary and practised some relevant grammatical structures they were then each given one letter from a Chinese student. The letters had been originally written by hand and it was clear that in order for the students to be able to read them they would have to be typed. At first students were only going to get the typed version but then we decided that they should receive the authentic hand written letter as well as the typed version. The language used in the letters was still too difficult for the students so a vocabulary list was also provided for each letter. From the teacher’s perspective, giving students these letters was like taking a step into the unknown. How would the students respond to a text which was much more difficult than any text they had read in the past? If the Year 11 students in the class struggled with the text would they think about not continuing with the language in the following year?

Students were given help to translate the letters and in this process individual discussions were had with students about the content of the letters and their reactions to what they were reading. Taken as a whole set, these letters did expressthe “complexity, variability and subtlety” (Scarino & Liddicoat 2009)of theseChinese young people’s thoughts and aspirations and in retrospect more time could have been devoted to their study. However, asking students to read all of them would have been to impose a huge linguistic burden on them.

Students were then asked to send an email in English to reply to the letter they had received. We might have not done this task because it was not something that would help the students improve their Chinese skills. We did it because the Chinese students wanted to receive an English letter back in reply to help them with their study of English. When we read the English letters the students sent to their Chinese counterparts, we realized to our surprise how much the students had ‘really drawn connections between themselves and others’ (Scarino & Liddicoat 2009, p. 63). Their replies were personal; they answered all the questions that they were asked as well as providing information about their own future and how it might be similar or different to that of their Chinese students. They also wished their students every success in the future. As this letter was not assessed as part of the course there was no external motivation for the students to write a detailed letter. They wrote them because they genuinely wanted to communicate with the person who had written to them.

Although the teacher and the researcher had not thought so much about writing a reply in English it was always intended that our students should reply in Chinese. In our discussions about the choice and use of authentic resources we were very much influenced by Mickan (2012). He indicates that “Texts set up opportunities for communication about content – for consent, for exploration of ideas and for contestation” (p.39).However, whereas students were given the freedom to reply in English as they wished, when they wrote their Chinese letter they were given some guiding questions by the teacher. These were the same questions which would form the basis of the conversation task which they would subsequently be asked to do, so in writing their Chinese reply they were also formulating and expressing in Chinese answers they would later need for the assessment task. It was pleasing to note that a number of students used phrases and words in their own letters they had learnt from their reading. What was of interest and some concern, though, was that their Chinese letters did not show the personal connection that had been so evident in their English letters.Was this due to the fact that were not given the freedom to write what they wanted and had to follow guidelines or was their ability to express their personal feelings limited by their Chinese language skills?

The second summative assessment task for this unit of work required students to write an application for a job described in an advertisement. The five job advertisements in Chinese photographed by the researcher were our first set of authentic materials. Again students first read a sample job advertisement in the textbook to familiarize them with the language and structures typical of job advertisements. The teacher then gave students these job advertisements to read. Again the Chinese in the advertisements was considered by the teacher to be quite difficult, especially as some of them were handwritten. With this in mind the teacher asked the students to see if they could identify just the job that was being advertised and not to worry about other information in the advertisements. This time no vocabulary or other support was provided. Again, surprisingly, from the teacher’s point of view, students went ahead themselves and read and translated all information contained in each advertisement. Once or twice they needed help to decipher a handwritten character but they showed genuine interest and a sense of achievement when they were able to work out what the advertisement was asking for.

With the second authentic text for this task, again the researcher was looking for a way to set up a task for students which enabled them to produce a response as authentic as possible in the context of writing a job application. Although the friend of the researcher who provided the job advertisement did not need any new employees, he agreed to read the applications students produced and choose the one he would employ.

The teacher had already chosen another job advertisement as the text for the assessment task, but decided to use the more authentic text. This text needed to be considerably modified. The expected reader of the ‘authentic’ advertisement would have been a Chinese native speaker who had already finished school and was in the work force. Our ‘job applicants’ were English speaking school students with perhaps no work experience except for their work experience placement through school. Also students needed to be able to write 250 characters in their response. With this in mind we added a number of personal qualities such as ‘interested in working as a waiter/waitress’, ‘hardworking, conscientious and polite’.

The teacher had decided that the response to the job application would be written under test conditions. Students were allowed to keep the job advertisement and read it at home, but the response was written in class. Students were allowed to submit one draft for correction, and then do their corrections in class, before completing their final writing of the assessment task again in class.

When the students were given the job advertisement they were told who had written it and the photos on the advertisement showed them the actual owner in this stall in the market. Some students recognized the stall when they looked at the picture. The teacher would have liked to discuss with students this very interesting authentic text writtenby a Chinese speaking person living outside China, containing English words as well as Chinese. She did not do this because it was part of a formal assessment task. Perhaps it would have been better to use this text for a formative task like the letters rather than a summative task.

4Analysis of student writing and feedback in response to the use of authentic texts

This section of the paper looks at the results of two surveys carried out by the researcher. The first survey asked students to talk about what they learnt from the Chinese letter they received, their attitudes and personal reactions to the information it contained, and how they felt when replying to it. The second survey was implemented after students had written their job application.

Nine students completed the surveys. Because each student’s response is determined by their own background and cultural understandings it is necessary to know some details of each student’s background in order to fully understand the context of their replies, especially as in this class there are students of very different backgrounds.Student 1, Student 3 and Student 10 come from an English speaking background.Student 2, Student 6 and Student 7 were born in Australia and are of Malaysian background. These students speak some Chinese at home.Student 4’s parents are from Guangdong but he was born in Australian and has only a smattering of Cantonese language background.Student 8 and Student 9 have recently arrived from overseas. Student 8 is Korean and Student 9 isCambodian.