Abstract:

This paper revisits the well-established principle of modern Foreign Language Teaching, which is particularly important for English for Specific Purposes – use of authentic texts. However, this time the learners’ perspective is studied in order to ensure true learner-centeredness of the teaching process. The main aim of the research is to establish whether students of different nationalities and language competence prefer to read and discuss authentic or adapted texts in their ESP classes.
After a lesson in which authentic and inauthentic legal texts were used, the students were asked to answer several questions to reveal their attitudes towards both types of texts. The survey included seven questions about the difficulties they had reading the texts, about the content value, grammar and vocabulary-related issues, which text they found more interesting and how they would like to work further with the texts. The questionnaires were distributed among 150 undergraduate students of six nationalities (Cuban, Russian, Kyrgyz, Mongols, Tajiks, and Arabs) in several leading universities in Moscow. The respondents were of various language proficiency ranging from elementary to upper-intermediate. Based on the answers, we could conclude that students regardless of their English level tend to be good at decoding the function of a text – informing the audience (in case of authentic texts) or presenting new language (adapted ones), finding the former significantly more engaging, relevant professionally and content-rich.
In addition, in the paper, we make a distinction between authentic texts and authentic uses of the texts, proving with the help of the survey that both are essential in teaching ESP. The students stated that after reading the authentic text they expect case studies, discussions and further study of the subject which is very close to the real-life, or authentic, use of the text, while in case of the adapted text the students correctly interpreted its intention to present the target language, which is manifested in the responses concerning the more likely follow-up language-related activities, such as selecting vocabulary, translating words and phrases and others.

Keywords:

Authenticity, authentic text, adapted text, ESP, multi-ethnic group.