Making it real : authenticity, process and pedagogy
Badger, Richard and MacDonald, Malcolm, 1953- (2010) Making it real : authenticity, process and pedagogy. Applied Linguistics, Vol.31 (No.4). pp. 578-582. ISSN 0142-6001Full text not available from this repository.
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/applin/amq021
Authenticity has been a part of the intellectual resources of language teaching since the 1890s but its precise meaning and implications are contested. This commentary argues for a view of authenticity which recognizes the limits of the concept as a guide for pedagogic practice and acknowledges the fact that texts are processes rather than products. First, authenticity may help to decide what texts not to use in class but provides no guidance about which authentic texts are, for example, motivating. Secondly, the term authenticity is misleading because it leads us to conceptualize authenticity as the bringing of a text from a communicative event into a classroom. Texts are the result of an interaction between what we might term a proto-text, sound waves, or marks on paper or screen, and a language user. The authenticity of a text in the classroom depends on the similarity between the way it is used in the classroom and the way it was used in its original communicative context.
|Item Type:||Journal Item|
|Subjects:||L Education > LB Theory and practice of education
P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
|Divisions:||Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Applied Linguistics|
|Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):||Language and languages -- Study and teaching, Applied linguistics|
|Journal or Publication Title:||Applied Linguistics|
|Publisher:||Oxford University Press|
|Official Date:||September 2010|
|Number of Pages:||5|
|Page Range:||pp. 578-582|
|Access rights to Published version:||Restricted or Subscription Access|
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