Abstract:

There is broad consensus that the ultimate goal of foreign language education is the formation of a language user who can function successfully and effectively in the sociocultural environment of the target language as well as in the international sphere. The pace at which the society develops nowadays poses an additional challenge to foreign language teachers, connected with the way in which recent social developments can be incorporate into their teaching and learning routine and thus make up for the relative rigidness of the published instructional materials. The present research effort attempts to provide an outline of best practices connected with the adaptation of authentic texts for the purposes of foreign language instruction, which can be useful as a guidance for in-service teachers. The Advanced Proficiency level is of particular interest in this regard due to the fact that learners at this stage are supposed to have already acquired the ability to function independently in a broad variety of linguistic contexts so modifications are likely to be scarce but unique purpose-wise. The present research, therefore, pursues the goal of identifying and analysing the purposes of the application of text adaptation techniques in the two chosen course books of English as a foreign language. Comparative and contrastive analysis is applied as the main method, whereby the course book texts are aligned with their original counterparts. The detected modifications are coded and categorised according to their form and role in the learning context created.

Keywords:

Text adaptation, advanced proficiency, authentic texts, EFL.