Authenticity and the World Language classroom.

At a training a language teacher spoke of using exclusively authentic language and activities to provide a completely ‘authentic’ experience in the classroom. I was troubled because as a language teacher whose L1 is English I often ‘create’ readings and other media for my students. It’s not always easy to find ‘authentic’ materials that are appropriate for students to maximize engagement and comprehension.

Since then I have asked many experts in the field of language acquisition about this. Dr Bill Van Patten said that what we are creating is a world in the classroom filled with authentic communicative purpose: if our goal is to maximize language acquisition it is often advisable to adapt or create resources for our students. It might even be preferable at times: ‘authentic’ content may have so much low frequency content the value is diluted for the learner, they are unable to focus on the content that the teacher is wanting them to process.

Karen Rowan, the Spanish language trainer for Denver ISD and owner of the language company FluencyFast, said that she creates a Spanish language environment that makes it unthinkable for the learner or student to use anything but Spanish during class: it becomes an authentic communicative experience where Spanish is the common link between participants. The ACTFL guideline is 90% L2 use in the classroom: her goal is 100% every day. She is an anglophone who is creating ‘authenticity’ linguistically by providing appropriate comprehensible input that engages the learner.

Yesterday I ran into a former colleague whose native language is Vietnamese. We spoke exclusively in French for over 15 minutes. French was our common language and we had an ‘authentic’ moment together, though neither of us is a native French speaker.

Our ultimate goal is for our learners to use the language we are teaching in the ‘real world’ but to get there we may need to create our own ‘world’ in the classroom using CI so they can engage effectively using the language learned in our ‘world’.

At a graduation ceremony this summer the dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford yelled out the first part of a common aphorism: “Practice makes…” and the crowd yelled “Perfect!” He shouted back: “Not so much!” He went on to explain that they had discovered in their research that the only practice that made significant difference was practice that was accompanied by timely and appropriate feedback where the learner was able to adjust his/her response. He emphasized how learning is a process and that for the experience to be optimized quality feedback was essential.

Every coach, music director and dance teacher know this: without appropriate feedback the learner will not progress as effectively.

We as language teachers are working with students who are being asked to perform constantly: to listen, speak, read and write in order to communicate in the languages we teach. How we approach monitoring and assessing their progress will have a profound effect on their success.

• Are we using assessment tools that encourage learners to improve their performance? 
• Do the tools set limits on the high achievers?