Using authentic material from the real world to teach English

Steffanie Zazulak
A pile of open books on top of each other

There are lots of resources available to English teachers today: from textbooks to online teaching tools, they can all aid and enrich English lessons. Many ESL teachers also introduce authentic English material into their lessons to expose learners to the language as it is spoken in the real world.

Authentic material is any material written in English that was not created for intentional use in the English classroom. Using this content for teaching English can make the teaching experience even more engaging, imaginative and motivating for students. It can also be useful to elicit genuine responses from English language learners.

The great thing about using authentic material is that it is everywhere, which makes it easy to find, and simple for learners to practice English in their own time. Remember that it isn¡¯t limited to articles from newspapers and magazines. Songs, TV programs and films, radio and podcasts, leaflets, menus ¨C anything written in English constitutes authentic material.

Selecting authentic material

The best content to select depends on the learners, their level of English and the course content the English teacher wishes to focus on. It¡¯s also a good idea to find out the learners¡¯ interests ¨C after all, there¡¯s no point trying to get students fascinated by a text on the latest sci-fi movie if they¡¯re all fans of action films.

The materials should reflect a situation that a student may face in an English-speaking environment ¨C this will help them transition into a world where English is the norm. In this world, people use abbreviations, body language is important and they¡¯ll use 'filler' sounds ¨C such as 'ummm' ¨C when they are speaking English ¨C and learners will encounter these in authentic material.

It¡¯s important not to overwhelm learners with the first piece of authentic material. So, choose articles, songs or sections of TV programs or movies that aren¡¯t too difficult to understand or take too long to get through.

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Some ways to use authentic material

Here are two ideas for using authentic material in class: do remember to develop the ideas into a proper lesson plan and explain the aims thoroughly to your learners¡­

1. Restaurant menus: order your favorite dish

Food is important to everyone, so introduce language learners to some of the common dishes in English-speaking countries so that they will be able to order meals with confidence. Many restaurants have their menus online, so you can easily download them (no need to walk or drive around the neighborhood).

Try to use local restaurants to make it more meaningful for your students, and ensure you have plenty of copies of the menu. You can then either go through the menu and ask each student to guess what the meals are, or they can write down what they would order. You could use different menus for each course, which would widen the types of dishes you can cover during the learning activity. You or another team member could pretend to be the waiter or waitress and your students can practice their spoken English by reading their order back to you.

At the end of the task, you could encourage learners to add up the cost of their courses to calculate their bill ¨C and even ask them to add on a 10% tip to mirror the experience of being in a real restaurant. Remember, these suggestions focus on different skills, so you could use them to form lesson plans for a 'speaking' lesson, a ¡°reading¡± lesson, etc.

2. Songs: recognizing English lyrics

Listening to?songs with English lyrics?is an excellent way of boosting skills in listening and pronunciation, and confidence in using the language.?And students will always respond positively to English classes that involve their favorite singer or band.

Ask your students to write down their favorite artist and a song by them that they like and have listened to a few times. They can then try to remember the lyrics, or look at the video on YouTube ¨C they only need to write down a few lines of the song. Then ask them to listen to the lyrics for useful vocabulary, phrases and expressions for everyday language, including colloquial speech.

The language used in lyrics can be casual, tell a simple story or convey strong emotions, which should help learners to establish a connection with the language because it will give them new ways to describe their feelings in different situations. You could even ask them to come up with alternative words, as a way of further increasing and using their vocabulary.

Some song lyrics are commonly misheard, so you could create a quiz in which students have to choose the next words ¨C words that grammatically fit into the lyrics. This can be a funny English lesson ¨C for you as well as your students.

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  • A young woman sat in a library with headphones around her neck reading a book

    Does progress in English slow as you get more advanced?

    By Ian Wood
    Reading time: 4 minutes

    Why does progression seem to slow down as an English learner moves from beginner to more advanced skills?

    The journey of learning English

    When presenting at ELT conferences, I often ask the audience ¨C typically teachers and school administrators ¨C ¡°When you left home today, to start your journey here, did you know where you were going?¡± The audience invariably responds with a laugh and says yes, of course. I then ask, ¡°Did you know roughly when you would arrive at your destination?¡± Again the answer is, of course, yes. ¡°But what about your students on their English learning journey? Can they say the same?¡± At this point, the laughter stops.

    All too often English learners find themselves without a clear picture of the journey they are embarking on and the steps they will need to take to achieve their goals. We all share a fundamental need for orientation, and in a world of mobile phone GPS we take it for granted. Questions such as: Where am I? Where am I going? When will I get there? are answered instantly at the touch of a screen. If you¡¯re driving along a motorway, you get a mileage sign every three miles.

    When they stop appearing regularly we soon feel uneasy. How often do English language learners see mileage signs counting down to their learning goal? Do they even have a specific goal?

    Am I there yet?

    The key thing about GPS is that it¡¯s very precise. You can see your start point, where you are heading and tell, to the mile or kilometer, how long your journey will be. You can also get an estimated time of arrival to the minute. As Mike Mayor mentioned in his post about what it means to be fluent, the same can¡¯t be said for understanding and measuring English proficiency. For several decades, the ELL industry got by with the terms ¡®beginner¡¯, ¡®elementary¡¯, ¡®pre-intermediate¡¯ and ¡®advanced¡¯ ¨C even though there was no definition of what they meant, where they started and where they ended.

    The CEFR has become widely accepted as a measure of English proficiency, bringing an element of shared understanding of what it means to be at a particular level in English. However, the wide bands that make up the CEFR can result in a situation where learners start a course of study as B1 and, when they end the course, they are still within the B1 band. That doesn¡¯t necessarily mean that their English skills haven¡¯t improved ¨C they might have developed substantially ¨C but it¡¯s just that the measurement system isn¡¯t granular enough to pick up these improvements in proficiency.

    So here¡¯s the first weakness in our English language GPS and one that¡¯s well on the way to being remedied with the Global Scale of English (GSE). Because the GSE measures proficiency on a 10-90 scale across each of the four skills, students using assessment tools reporting on the GSE are able to see incremental progress in their skills even within a CEFR level. So we have the map for an English language GPS to be able to track location and plot the journey to the end goal.

    ¡®The intermediate plateau¡¯

    When it comes to pinpointing how long it¡¯s going to take to reach that goal, we need to factor in the fact that the amount of effort it takes to improve your English increases as you become more proficient. Although the bands in the CEFR are approximately the same width, the law of diminishing returns means that the better your English is to begin with, the harder it is to make further progress ¨C and the harder it is to feel that progress is being made.

    That¡¯s why many an English language-learning journey gets abandoned on the intermediate plateau. With no sense of progression or a tangible, achievable goal on the horizon, the learner can become disoriented and demoralised.

    To draw another travel analogy, when you climb 100 meters up a mountain at 5,000 meters above sea level the effort required is greater than when you climb 100 meters of gentle slope down in the foothills. It¡¯s exactly the same 100 meter distance, it¡¯s just that those hundred 100 meters require progressively more effort the higher up you are, and the steeper the slope. So, how do we keep learners motivated as they pass through the intermediate plateau?

    Education, effort and motivation

    We have a number of tools available to keep learners on track as they start to experience the law of diminishing returns. We can show every bit of progress they are making using tools that capture incremental improvements in ability. We can also provide new content that challenges the learner in a way that¡¯s realistic.

    Setting unrealistic expectations and promising outcomes that aren¡¯t deliverable is hugely demotivating for the learner. It also has a negative impact on teachers ¨C it¡¯s hard to feel job satisfaction when your students are feeling increasingly frustrated by their apparent lack of progress.

    Big data is providing a growing bank of information. In the long term this will deliver a much more precise estimate of effort required to reach higher levels of proficiency, even down to a recommendation of the hours required to go from A to B and how those hours are best invested. That way, learners and teachers alike would be able to see where they are now, where they want to be and a path to get there. It¡¯s a fully functioning English language learning GPS system, if you like.