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Designing Authenticity into Language Learning Materials
By Freda Mishan Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2005 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-904-4
CHAPTER 1
Authenticity in language Learning
Background and Definition
The elusive definitions of the terms 'authentic' and 'authenticity' and their application to language learning have been the subject of great controversy over the past three decades. The stimulus for this can be dated back to the inception of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in the 1970s. Giving precedence to communication over form, CLT rejected previous, strictly structural approaches to language learning and opened the way for the use of authentic texts, texts which had been created for a genuine communicative purpose. This prompted the so- called 'authenticity debate' in which the nature of authenticity has been applied to everything from the original appearance of a text to perception and validation by the text user, and which has been further complicated by the advent of texts and interactions occurring on information and communications technologies (ICT). Before getting on to the complexities of the current debate, however, this chapter starts by situating this contemporary 'search for authenticity' within its historical context, where it will emerge that the quest is not, after all, unique to the modern era.
1.1 Authenticity in Language Learning: The Historical background
The total corpus of ideas accessible to language teachers has not changed basically in 2000 years. What has been in constant change are the ways of building methods from them, and the part of the corpus that is accepted varies from generation to generation, as does the form in which the ideas present themselves. (Kelly 1969: 363)
With this in mind, sifting through the history books reveals many precedents for authenticity in language learning, and these can be seen to fall into three groups: 'communicative approaches' in which communication is both the objective of language learning and the means through which the language is taught, 'materials- focused' approaches, in which learning is centred principally round the text, and 'humanistic approaches' which address the 'whole' learner and emphasise the value of individual development.
1.1.1 'Communicative' approaches
The cyclical nature of the evolution of language pedagogy is nowhere more apparent than in the communicative approaches used at both extremes of the five millennia covered here. This may be justification for arguing that this is after all the most natural approach, based as it is on the premise that a means of communication can only be learned by using it for this purpose. 'Communicative' approaches were used in the earliest colonial contexts. As early civilisations discovered and conquered other lands, the need to communicate with speakers of other languages arose. Historians have found evidence that second language teaching took place among the Sumerians from around 2700 BC (Titone 1968: 5), when they were conquered by the Akkadian Semites who then wanted to adopt the 'local' language. Much of this early language learning and teaching in colonial contexts then and later (for example, in the Egyptian and Roman Empires) may be said to have been authentic in spirit, in that the language was usually acquired in non-classroom situations and without specially prepared language materials. It was usually done via direct contact with native speakers, either through sojourns in foreign parts or, as was common among the Romans, through the employment of a Greek-speaking tutor or slave (Titone 1968: 6). Roman education was bilingual from infancy. The basis for foreign language teaching in Roman times can therefore be said to have been communicative in its purpose and authentic in execution, even though this may have been for reasons of convenience more than pedagogical principle.
Pedagogical principle was, on the other hand, certainly the impetus for one of the best-recorded instances in history of a genuinely communicative and authentic approach to language learning; that taken in the 16century in the education of Michel de Montaigne:
In my infancy, and before I began to speak, he [my father] committed me to the care of a German [...] totally ignorant of our language, but very fluent, and a great critic in Latin. This man [...] had me continually with him: to him there were also joined two others [...] who all of them spoke to me in no other language but Latin. As to the rest of his family, it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself, nor my mother, man nor maid, should speak anything in my company, but such Latin words as every one had learned only to gabble with me [...] I was above six years of age before I understood either French or Perigordin [...] and without art, book, grammar, or precept, whipping, or the expense of a tear, I had, by that time, learned to speak as pure Latin as my master himself. (Michel de Montaigne 1575).
The present-day permutation of the notion of communicativeness emerged in the 1970s following a century of frenetic experimentation and development in language teaching methodology. The preceding hundred years had seen a transformation from academic approaches, to experimentation with so-called 'Natural' and 'Direct' methodologies, to the first attempts at harnessing technology for learning purposes. However, while all these approaches had some influence on the synthesis of CLT, its real roots may be traced to the advent of the new field of linguistics around the turn of the century. From this developed the branch of psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive faculties involved in the acquisition of language. The publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax(Chomsky 1965) in which the distinction is drawn between speakers' competence(their knowledge of the language system) and their performance(their use of the language) is generally seen as the spark which ignited the Communicative philosophy that was to dominate the last three decades of the 20century (Howatt 1984: 271). Chomsky's notion of competence was later transformed into one of 'communicative competence', which encompassed language use: 'There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless' (Hymes 1971; 1979: 15). Competence was now seen as 'the overall underlying knowledge and ability for language use which the speaker-listener possesses [...] this involves far more than knowledge of (and ability for) grammaticality' (Brumfit and Johnson 1979: 13-14). In other words, an individual's communicative competence involved what s/he needed to know about the language and its culture, and how well s/he was able to use the language in order to communicate successfully, that is, to get the desired outcome from the interaction. It is this notion of communicative competence that is the cornerstone of CLT.
The Communicative philosophy meant a reorientation of former teaching priorities; the teaching of communication via language, not the teaching of language via communication (Allwright 1979: 167). In other words, effective communication was the goal, the language merely the means; and it was through the attempt to communicate using the language that the language was acquired. The idea of using texts 'communicatively', that is, exploiting them for their content rather than for their linguistic structure, represented a key precept of CLT, viz., the predominance of meaning over form. The pivot of Communicative methodology - and where it can and does so easily fall down - is the design of, and learner engagement in, genuinely communicative activities. Typical activities of the early years of CLT used the strategy of information gaps; in order to bridge the gap, learners had to communicate (Johnson 1979: 201). The gap was produced basically by providing information to one member of a pair and withholding it from the other, as in the now standard 'pair-work' exercise. By the 1980s, 'Communicative' was the buzzword in all ELT coursebooks, although, as is often the case with commercial permutations of pedagogical approaches, Communicative 'templates' were sometimes used without their raison d'etre. Nevertheless the realia creeping into the Communicative coursebook heralded the advent of the use of authentic texts which would eventually help return CLT to its 'meaningful' roots.
1.1.2 Materials-focused approaches
As with communicativeness, materials-focused approaches also have a long history, with instances of the use of authentic texts for language learning occurring as early as 9-century England. At that time, Latin was the international (European) language of communication. However, there were attempts to improve the education of the common people by integrating the vernaculars - Old English, Anglo-Saxon - into the education system, through translation of books into the vernaculars (some translations were done by the famous King Alfred himself, according to Pugh 1996: 160). Both the texts and methods of learning may be defined as authentic; long stretches of text were read in what has been called a 'holistic, reading for meaning approach' (Pugh 1996: 163).
The teaching of Latin passed through different stages over the centuries during which it was an international language, but by Medieval times, the teaching method used (in England as elsewhere) was the 'scholastic method' which consisted of breaking down words into their constituent parts. Learning the alphabet was therefore the pre-requisite for reading, and finally memorising, sections of 'primers'. These were not specially written texts for children, but were authentic texts, basic prayer books. This highlights one of the controversial issues of the use of authentic texts for learning, one that will be touched on in Chapter 3, viz., their potential for political, cultural or, in this case, religious indoctrination. As well as being identified with literacy (the Latin verb legere was used to mean specifically 'to read Latin'), Latin had crucial religio-political importance in the Middle Ages, and the objective of learning Latin as opposed to the vernacular 'was not to acquire a wide competence in reading [...] but to express the elements of Christian teaching' (Clanchy 1984 cited in Pugh 1996: 162).
A more liberal application of authentic texts in language learning can be seen in the method devised by Roger Ascham in the mid-16century. Ascham developed a 'double translation' method, in which pupils translated the target language text into the mother tongue, and then re-translated their versions into the target language. Ascham used simple but authentic texts in this process - when applied to the teaching of Latin, for instance, he used texts by Cicero. Interestingly, this technique is currently being revived in the context of cultural awareness-raising, where double translation at discourse level (rather than simply word/sentence level) is seen as a means of raising consciousness of cultural implications of linguistic choices (Pulverness 1999a: 9). The 'inductive approach' (whereby readers infer grammar rules out of the texts) adopted by Ascham (and later by others) is also strikingly modern (Howatt 1984: 24, 35, Titone 1968: 12).
An 'inductive' approach is also the basis of the theory of language pedagogy put forward by Henry Sweet in his 1899 work The Practical Study of Languages. Sweet used the term 'inductively' slightly differently from the modern sense (which he called the 'inventional method' and dismissed as being slow and frustrating for the learner). By 'inductive', Sweet meant that teachers should illustrate grammar with appropriate paradigmatic texts, which learners could then examine for more examples. Sweet maintained that the foundation of language study should be what he called 'connected texts' (this was in part a reaction against the dominance of the detached sentence in language teaching); 'it is only in connected texts that the language itself can be given with each word in a natural and adequate context' (1899: 164). He argued that the connected text was the best context for learners to establish and strengthen the correct associations between words, their contexts and their meanings (1899: 164-73) and that only after it has been thoroughly studied and assimilated should the teacher draw out of it grammar points and vocabulary items (1899:192-3). The arguments that Sweet made for the use of authentic texts sound strikingly modern in that the practice persists to this day: 'If we try to make our texts embody certain definite grammatical categories, the texts cease to be natural: they become either trivial, tedious and long-winded, or else they become more or less monstrosities' (Sweet 1899: 192).
Like Ascham, Sweet also saw the need for maintaining authenticity with lower level learners by providing simpler language samples. He suggested that such levels be catered for by selecting certain genres which are simpler than others, such as descriptive pieces (Sweet 1899: 177). In this he anticipated by almost a century, present-day arguments for authentic texts: 'Texts need not be "grammatically sequenced" they need only to capture student attention and be comprehensible' (Krashen 1989: 19-20). Sweet also took pains to stress the positive advantage of using what he called 'natural' texts, because of their variety:
The great advantage of natural, idiomatic texts over artificial 'methods' or 'series' is that they do justice to every feature of the language [...] the artificial systems, on the other hand, tend to cause incessant repetition of certain grammatical constructions, certain elements of vocabulary, certain combinations of words to the almost total exclusion of others. (Sweet 1899: 178)
On the other hand, he was not averse to textbook writers producing simpler 'natural' texts for more elementary learners, as long as each text was not dedicated to a single grammatical rule, but presented variety ('everything' as he put it). It is interesting that this point was, and has been, frequently ignored in textbook writing to the present day.
The 20th century was dominated by materials-focused approaches albeit embodying many different theories of language acquisition. First came the 'New Method' of the 1950s, which developed out of research into vocabulary frequency and the subsequent development of the 'lexical distribution principle' (Howatt's term, 1984: 247). This principle was reflected in a spate of publications of grammars, dictionaries and word-lists all containing limited and controlled lexical and grammatical material. The graded reader concept began at this time, in which new words were restricted in number and introduced progressively. The principles of the approach led, more critically, to the much-maligned practice of simplifying works of literature - 'simplifying great fiction is like reducing a stock when cooking - it rapidly becomes too concentrated and indigestible' (Prowse 1999 cited in Kershaw and Kershaw 2000; see also arguments in Vincent and Carter 1991 and Valdes 1986a, among others).
Other methods followed; the 'Oral Method', the 'Situational Approach', the 'Direct Method', and the 'Audiolingual Method', all of which relied on carefully structured materials and prescribed classroom practices. The culmination of such approaches was an effective 'cult of materials' (Howatt, 1984: 267), in which 'the authority of the approach resided in the materials themselves'(Howatt ibid.). This may be seen as the start of a debilitating phenomenon in the ELT profession that still exists today; of dependency on, and subservience to the textbook, still the teaching material of choice for the majority of teachers (see Chapter 3). As the importance of foreign language learning increased with the progress of the century, it effectively developed into a modern industry accompanied by ever-evolving methodologies and production of pedagogical literature. This meant that, ironically, as the need for learning foreign languages for genuine communicative purposes increased, the authenticity of the languages in terms of materials tended to decline.
1.1.3 Humanistic approaches
Another thematically related group of approaches relevant to authenticity, can be termed 'humanistic' approaches, and these recurred periodically throughout history, frequently in reaction to more mechanistic teaching methods. Reaction to the practice of rote-learning which pervaded the learning of Latin and Greek during the 16century, for instance, came most memorably from the great humanist educator, Comenius. In his work on language, the Orbis Sensualium Pictus(1658), Comenius gave a singularly modern emphasis on (to use modern terminology) 'language use' rather than 'language usage': 'Every language must be learned by practice rather than by rules, especially by reading, repeating, copying, and by written and oral attempts at imitation' (Comenius cited in Titone 1968: 14-15). Comenius also advocated an 'intuitive approach', which used sensory experience as the starting point for language learning. The main tenet of this approach was that learners respond to visual stimuli, objects and pictures, and not to abstracts, such as grammar rules.
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Excerpted from Designing Authenticity into Language Learning Materials by Freda Mishan. Copyright © 2005 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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