Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 208

A common assumption among language educators is that authentic materials can be an important source of motivation because learners perceive their real‐world purpose and cultural relevance. For example, Matsumoto (2007) documented that authentic Japanese learning materials (e.g., movies, animation/anime, songs) constituted a “peak learning experience” for many American learners of Japanese (p. 200). Nevertheless, the relationship between authenticity and motivation is not straightforward. Authentic texts that are too difficult for the students, especially if presented without sufficient pedagogical support, can result in frustration rather than enhanced motivation. In fact, some studies have found that learners prefer non‐authentic materials. Kmiecik and Barkhuizen (2006) reported that learners of English favored nonauthentic listening texts because they were easier to comprehend; they felt overwhelmed by the speed of delivery and unknown vocabulary in the authentic listening materials. Thus, authentic texts are not inherently motivating. As Gilmore (2007) explained,

the success of any particular set of authentic materials in motivating a specific group of learners will depend on how appropriate they are for the subjects in question, how they are exploited in class (the tasks) and how effectively the teacher is able to mediate between the materials and the students. (p. 107)

A compelling reason for using authentic texts is that they typically provide better language models than textbooks. Although the quality of instructional materials can vary, research has consistently shown mismatches between textbooks and natural language use, especially with respect to spoken language (see Gilmore, 2015, for a comprehensive list of studies that document such mismatches). In addition, textbooks generally present little information about pragmatically appropriate language use. Speech acts (e.g., apologizing, making a request, giving advice), as presented in textbooks, may differ quite dramatically from how they are realized in real‐life conversations. McConachy and Hata (2013) maintain that textbooks cover a limited range of speech acts, and furthermore, provide a very narrow range of expressions—often an inventory of decontextualized phrases—for achieving those speech acts. Consequently, researchers have advocated for authentic materials as a way of providing learners with models of language that show how speech acts are constructed and interpreted in the target culture.

An important curricular reason to use authentic materials is that they provide a vehicle for integrating language and content. As mentioned previously, many foreign‐language programs aim to integrate more varied and richer content in lower‐level courses. For example, this may involve students watching portions of a cooking show (an authentic television program) within a lesson on food vocabulary. Grammatical structures can also be taught through authentic materials with a story‐based approach called PACE (Adair‐Huck & Donato, 2002). Crucially, authentic materials can provide opportunities for students to think critically about the social, cultural, and political issues affecting the country or countries where the language is spoken.