Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Authentic and non-authentic language
A further distinction is between authentic and non-authentic language. Here is
the opening dialogue from New English File (Oxenden et al., 2004):
A: Hi. I’m Tom. What’s your name?
B: Anna.
A: Sorry?
B: Anna!
This is non-authentic language specially constructed for its teaching potential.
People in real-life conversations do not speak in full grammatical sentences and 
Classroom interaction and Conversation Analysis
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do not keep to a clear sequence of turns. Nor do they tend to go up to complete
strangers and introduce themselves, except in certain socially sanctioned situations
(speed-dating?).
Instead they speak like these two people, recorded while talking about ghosts
for my coursebook English Topics (Cook, 1975):
Mrs Bagg: Oh, how extraordinary.
Jenny Drew: So…‘cos quite a quite a lot of things like that.
Mrs Bagg: I mean were they frightened? ‘Cos I think if I actually…
Jenny Drew: No.
Mrs Bagg: …saw a ghost because I don’t believe in them really, I would be
frightened, you know to think that I was completely wrong.
This is an example of authentic language, defined by David Little et al. (1988) as
language ‘created to fulfil some social purpose in the language community in
which it was produced’. Until recently, teaching provided the students with spe-
cially adapted language, not only simplified in terms of syntax and confined in
vocabulary, but also tidied up in terms of discourse structure. The belief was that
such non-authentic language was vital to L2 learning.
With the advent of methods that looked at the communicative situations the
students were going to encounter, it seemed clear that the students were handi-
capped by never hearing authentic speech in all its richness and diversity. Hence
exercises and courses have proliferated that turn away from specially constructed
classroom language to pieces of language that have really been used by native
speakers, whether tapes of conversations, advertisements from magazines, train
timetables, or a thousand and one other sources. In most countries it is possible to
use authentic texts based on local circumstances taken from local English-lan-
guage newspapers, such as the Jerusalem Post or the Buenos Aires Herald, often
available from the Internet these days, for example the Athens News, the Straits
Times (Singapore) or Granma (Havana).
Two justifications for the use of authentic text in communicative teaching are
put forward by Little et al. (1988):
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