Texts that have been written or selected for classroom use have usually been written or selected with more than one purpose in mind. Good teaching-texts for classroom use are not there simply in order to be read. If they are any good, they lead to comment and interpretation by learners, and also illustrate typical pragmatic uses of lexis and structure. They have to be fairly short, so that other activities besides comprehension can occur What is more, they have to be 'appropriately accessible'. This means ''not too difficult for learners to understand but difficult enough to encourage them to develop further in the language'.
All good 'authentic' materials are written or spoken with a particular audience in mind. Good speakers or writers take into account how much their listeners or readers are likely to know already , and use language which they think their readers and listeners - or fellow conversationalists ? will understand. Good language teachers and writers of language-teaching materials do the same thing; they modify the style and density of the language they use to suit the people they are speaking with or writing for. They do not pretend that the people they are teaching have the kind of intuitive and instinctive grasp of English that native-speakers have. If those learners were just the same as native-speakers, they would not be in their classrooms.
Henry Widdowson has pointed out that authentic instances of language use do 'not guarantee an authentic response in the form of appropriate language activity.'.
Authenticity (like needs) is a term which creates confusion because of a basic ambiguity. It can, on the one hand, be used to refer to actually attested language produced by native speakers for a normal communicative purpose. In this sense it refers to naturalistic textual data. But the term can be used, quite legitimately, to refer to the communicative activity of the language user, to the engagement of interpretative procedures for making sense, even if these procedures are operating on and with textual data which are not authentic in the first place. An authentic stimulus in the form of attested instances of language does not guarantee an authentic response in the form of appropriate language activity.'
None of this implies that all authentic language is unsuitable. It simply means that writing and speaking 'authentically' to learners is not at all the same as speaking to and writing for native-speakers. Both kinds of speaking and writing require very real but sometimes different kinds of skills. The belief that 'only authentic materials will do' is one more reason why important and essential skills in international EFL are either misunderstood or not understood at all ? and one more reason why EFL teachers and their trainers at the end of the twentieth century are likely to misunderstand or not understand at all some of the real challenges of EFL in the twenty-first century.
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