Authentical Materials

Authentic materials refer to oral and written language materials used in daily situations by native speakers of the language (Rogers & Medley, 1988). Authentic materials like magazines, newspapers, radio and television programs are becoming very common means to deliver academic content in the classroom when learning a foreign language.

An advantage of introducing authentic materials at an early stage of language learning is to help students become familiar with the target language (Field,1998).

One thing that most researches have in common about the authentic material is that it exposes learners to real life contexts which they are likely to find as soon as they leave the classroom. The main advantages of using authentic materials are (Philips and Shettlesworth 1978; Clarke 1989; peacock 1997, cited in Richards, 2001):

• They have a positive effect on learner motivation.

• They provide authentic cultural information.

• They provide exposure to real language.

• They relate more closely to learners’ needs.

• They support a more creative approach to teaching.

Bernardo (2006) also states that ¨The artificial nature of the language and structures used, make them very unlike anything that the learner will encounter in the real world and very often they do not reflect how the language is really used.

This might be the reason why students at the language center do not do well in their examinations and have trouble understanding a magazine, or a radio program in the target language.

However, the necessity of agreeing on the criteria when selecting this type of texts emerges. Nuttall (cited in Bernardo, 2006) gives three main criteria when choosing texts to be used in the classroom: suitability of content, exploitability and readability; suitability, meaning that it should be interesting to learners and equally relevant to their needs.

Exploitability refers to how the text can be used in favor of teaching purposes and readability which refers to the combination of structural and lexical difficulty of a text.

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