Authentic Materials: The Bridge to the Real Language Use

Materials exist in order to support learning and teaching process, so they should be designed to suit the people and the processes involved. The teachers must be realizing that their purpose is not to teach the materials itself, but they are teaching the students using the materials. There are many kinds of materials such as published materials, teacher produced materials, authentic materials and students materials. Published materials refer to the textbook and course books used by the teacher, then teacher produced materials are the materials that produced by the teacher to bridge the gap between the classroom in the world outside. Other important materials to introduce are authentic materials and students materials. Authentic material is refers to examples of language that were not originally produced for language learning purposes, for example the teacher cut out newspaper and use it in the classroom. There are many examples of authentic materials, such as menus, job applications, voice mail messages, radio programs, videos, etc. The last is student materials, in a two ways it is the learning materials produced by the students and the role of students themselves as the materials.

As a future teacher, we need to expose more about the using of authentic materials, because it can represent the actual goal of language learning including the difficulties that learning materials avoid such as the learners should learn how to respond to language which they do not fully understand and it also increase the motivation of the students to learn more about the use of English in real world condition. The use of authentic materials can also expose the students’ cultural awareness, because they get new and various information about the other culture. In addition of teaching process, we also need to develop our creativity and responsibility in teaching our classroom, because the good materials cannot be understand by the students without balanced by the good way of the delivering the materials itself.

Source: A book entitled essentials of English language teaching by Julian Edge in 1993 page 43-60

Adapting a Turkish middle school textbook to develop cultural awareness

Tomalin and Stempleski (1994) identify three qualities of cultural awareness: awareness of learners’ own cultural behaviour, awareness of others’ cultural behaviour, and the ability to explain their own cultural position, and adopt a task-oriented approach towards teaching culture, where learners cooperate in pairs or groups for gathering, sharing, discussing and interpreting information in view of both the target and native cultures. For this reason, the present activities are designed in such a way that (1) learners in pairs and groups work together to collect information, (2) decide whether the situation is similar or different in their own culture, (3) express their own stance toward the situation by drawing on from their real lives. Consequently, originally a sexist and unstimulating material has been reconstructed by such adaptation strategies as addition, modification, omission, reordering, and replacement, and exploited to resist stereotyping, and to develop cultural awareness and tolerance.

As a future teacher we need to select the appropriate books and materials to teach to the students. The materials in the books itself should balanced between the language proficiency and intercultural competence. Therefore, the teacher can adapt some strategies from this journal to add the cultural content, modify the materials, and omit the unimportant and irrelevant materials and replacement with the better materials in order to achieve the language and cultural needs.

Reference: A journal entitled Adapting a Turkish middle school textbook to develop cultural awareness by Meliha R. Simsek, 2014