[L544] Reflection #4 (Authenticity)

• Johnston, B. (2007). Theory and Research: Audience, Language Use, and Language Learning. In J. Egbert & E. Hanson-Smith (Eds) CALL environments: Research, practice, and critical issues (2^nd edn) (pp.61-70). Alexandria VA: TESOL.

• Chapelle, C. A. & Liu, H. (2007). Theory and Research: Investigating Authenticity. In J. Egbert & E. Hanson-Smith (Eds) CALL environments: Research, practice, and critical issues (2^nd edn) (pp.111-129). Alexandria VA: TESOL.

Widdowson (1979) uses the terms genuine and authentic from different point of views. According to him, genuine refers to real-life extracted language as an absolute quality, whereas authentic refers to the learners’ engagement of strategies for making sense of language in context (p.112). Thus, a genuine text is not necessarily authentic, and in this sense, performances or tasks students will do in class are neither completely authentic nor inauthentic. Authenticity is a relative quality that depends on how learners process the language of the activity (p.112), and it can be judged from multiple perspectives, by task designers, teachers, and students as well (p.126). To me, it sounds like raw genuine text/context/task can be tailored (or reconceptualized) to become authentic and meaningful resources for learners.

Authenticity in language education seems to be controlled mostly only by teachers or task designers since they are in a position of providers, but learners themselves would affect the authenticity in their learning as well. Johnston (2007) defines ‘Authenticity’ as ‘whether or not the message is being read or listened to for its meaning by audience’ (p.61). Therefore, not only resource providers such as teachers or learning material developers but also audience (students) can play a crucial role in authenticity in their learning in that authenticity really dwells not in the audience itself but in ‘what the audience choose to do with the text’ (p.66). Thus, we can say that having (or making) authentic learning materials relies on learners to some extent, such as learners’ attitude, behaviors, autonomy, beliefs, creativeness, etc. 

Before reading these articles, I thought authenticity refers only to the topics or materials that teacher uses in class, such as real-life example sentences/dialogues or tasks that are likely to happen in real world. However, like mentioned above, authenticity should be judged from multi perspectives of all the stakeholders such as task designers, teachers, and especially students. The extent of how to construct their own interpretation of a given text and how to make it meaningful counts on learners themselves for sure, and teachers should be aware of this point as well so that they encourages students to be more involved in their language learning.