Authentic Texts in Second Language Teaching Process

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Abstract：In SLA classrooms,it’s an inevitable issue that teachers need to choose proper texts to their students according to students’ actual competence.This paper mainly talks about this issue by comparing two articles.

Key words：Authentic Texts Second Language

Lots of teachers consider using authentic texts in their classes because sometimes authentic materials’ benefits overweigh non-authentic materials.While Guariento,W.and Morley,J.’s view “authentic materials is beneficial to the learning process” (2001，p.347),and Berardo’s opinion “the use of authentic materials is discussed,with the students benefiting from the exposure to real language being used in a real context” (2006,p.60) both emphasize the function of authentic materials in SLA process.

The content of Guariento and Morley’s article is consisted by two aspects,authentic texts and authentic tasks,which stress the input and output of students concurrently.The reason for authors doing so is that they think task authenticity needs equal consideration as well as text authenticity.In contrast,Berardo’s article pays special attention to one aspect only,that is,authentic texts in teaching of reading.Even though two articles all recognize the advantages of authentic materials,Berardo’s one is more comprehensively in this aspect because it also stresses the disadvantages of authentic texts.Guariento and Morley hold the view that authentic materials are the key point which can relate students to the real world; which means they can really apply information to their everyday life.For example,as long as they learn how to buy train tickets from authentic materials,they can practice buying train tickets immediately.By contrast,Berardo’s article is more profound since it’s not only illustrating the function and advantages of authentic materials,but also pointing out the concerns and drawbacks of those materials.The author makes a chart which has two columns to show the contrast explicitly.In the left column,author indicates that students can acquire real language with pleasure and they can get to know what’s happening in the world by high motivation.What’s more,they can get versatile uses of different types of materials.In this way,people can use a same material in different levels.On the other hand,in the right hand column,the author admits that authentic materials can be cultural and personal biased sometimes.In addition,because of the intricate construction of classes,some particular vocabularies and material structures may not be suitable for all of them.Last,if only materials become out-dated,students will lose their interest very quickly.

In the SLA classrooms,it’s inevitable that every student has his own level in understanding,acquiring and applying ability,so that it’s quite natural that some low level students could not keep pace with high level students.Here,from two articles,we can find different perspectives on this issue.As Guariento and Morley say,there are two ways to deal with this problem.Although it is rather hard for teacher to adapt authentic texts to meet all the vocabulary and syntactic standards for low level students,simplification could be a wise way to achieve both current communication and deeper language acquiring.Simultaneously,there is another way to balance both sides; that is,just stress partial understanding of authentic texts in low level students,but it may affect the understanding of whole texts and raise the possibility of exposure to non-authentic texts.On the other hand,in Berardo’s opinion,the solutions are not limited into these two aspects.The author not only emphasizes the importance of simplification and partial understanding; but also mentions an alternative way to alleviate difficulty,that is,design some pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading activities which can help the understanding of texts.By doing so,low level students can handle the unfamiliar materials easier and faster.What’s more,the author indicates some parameters to consider during simplifying procedure.For instance,in order to achieve linguistic simplicity,teachers should consider the elements of grammatical structures,lexical items and readability; for the purpose of cognitive simplicity,teachers need to take age,education and interest of learners into consideration; and in the psychological simplicity aspect,teachers are supposed to think about whether it suitable to society norms.

In sum,authentic texts are absolutely indispensable resources in SLA classes; on top of that,we cannot ignore the function and help of authentic tasks for the reason that second language learner can acquire their second language easier and faster by using them.