Abstract:

The value of authentic materials in language teaching is widely documented and has been acclaimed since the end of the nineteenth century. Debates on this topic have set alight researchers and teachers alike for many decades, involving adjacent fields like pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural studies etc. However, despite the passionate and increasingly sophisticated arguments brought forward to support this approach, the steps actually taken for the implementation of this approach have been rather slow. When faced with the challenge of using authentic materials, textbooks often fall short. This paper examines the added value real-life conversations, genuine interactions and authentic texts bring to the process of teaching foreign languages, and explores the opportunities generated by this approach, while also presenting the difficulties and problems that come along with such an ambitious endeavor.
The study presents the findings of a study conducted in 2021, at the Preparatory Year for Romanian as a Foreign Language, which analyzed the extent to which authentic materials can be used to enhance language learning at B1 level. A series of educational materials (texts, audio and video) and didactic strategies to generate meaningful, real-life communicative contexts were selected by a team of three teachers and tested in the classroom. The feedback was measured through student and teacher observation sheets and through brief tests that checked the progress achieved by the students. The results showed that authentic materials and genuine communication contexts were more interesting and engaging for students, but also proved that there is a significant gap between textbook language and authentic language and that the selection of such materials faces issues related to acquisition order, grammatical accuracy, vocabulary inappropriateness and learning durability.

Keywords:

Language teaching, authentic materials, language compentences.