David Nunan joins us to discuss the input we use in language lessons and what we do with it. Authentic texts have enormous potential, but can all be very challenging for learners to understand. In this episode David discusses how these can be used with learners of all levels.
Authentic Texts and Tasks (With David Nunan)
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute" podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn and this week we're talking about authentic texts. It's a topic I've wanted to talk about for a long time.
I can remember, even as a first year teacher, printing off news articles and bringing them to the classroom and, much more recently, using textbooks made for American primary schools with students, young learners, here in China.
Obviously there's huge advantages to using authentic texts. You get all this real language which has been unfiltered and it's real and it's natural, and hopefully the texts can be very motivating for students.
There's also lot of downsides as well to using authentic texts. It can be very difficult to understand. Sometimes I think they can be really off‑putting for students, if you get presented with something that's real and you can't understand any of it.
I think as a student that can be a really demotivating experience. So, to help us with this topic today, we have David Nunan. David is, I think it's not an exaggeration to say, one of the most influential people in our field in the last 40 years. David, as well as writing numerous academic books for teachers and researchers, he's also author of the bestselling coursebook series "Go for It!" and David is currently based in Hong Kong.
Enjoy the interview.
Ross: David, thank you very much for joining us. To start off with, would you like to tell us a bit about your experiences of using authentic materials as a teacher?
David Nunan: Yeah. I'm a dinosaur. I trained in the '60s, early '70s, and was trained in the audio‑lingual methods. "This is a pencil. Pen. This is a pen. Idiot. You're an idiot."
Ross: [laughs]
David: The funny thing was, in the mid '70s coming to the UK to do a couple of higher degrees including one in language teaching...Prior to that, the language institute I was working at at the university in Sydney with a number of highly enthusiastic teachers who were bored out of their brains with all this audio‑lingual stuff, we started doing things.
I developed a listening course by actually lugging this reel‑to‑reel tape recorder out and interviewing native speakers, then using that as a resource in the classroom. One of my other co‑teachers, Jane Lockwood, she used to work with Mario Rinvolucri at Pilgrim School in the UK. Of course she had got all of the Mario, she had the Mario virus. She was great, she was great on using drama techniques and so on.
We were kind of inventing communicative language teaching without actually knowing what we were doing. [laughs] In those days, the label was only just starting to come into currency. But using authentic materials and using simulations and getting the learners to do stuff out of the classroom and all those other things.
Ross: I can image, David, quite a few listeners are going to be doing a Google Image search for a reel‑to‑reel tape recorder after that.
Let's talk a bit more about this notion of authenticity, then. There's obviously this idea of authenticity in terms of the language. How real it is, is it something recorded specifically for a language class? Like your example earlier, something from a real conversation or from a TV show or radio show or maybe even a news article, something like that.
The other bit of the puzzle there, I guess, is what you get students to do with that. If the idea of task authenticity, so our learners, for example, listening to something and then giving an opinion and discussing it, or using it to solve some kind of problem or maybe they are doing something more focused on the language like read this passage and then circle the verb.
Suppose there are different possibilities there combining either authentic or inauthentic text with authentic or inauthentic tasks. Can you tell us a little bit more about those? What are the advantages and disadvantages there?
David: Yeah. Well, the minute you take a piece of authentic language into the classroom you deal with authenticating it, in a sense.
The authenticity of the input, the reading and the written‑spoken text that they're exposed to, but then there's the notion of task authenticity. I've seen teachers take ‑‑ no, I'm not necessarily criticizing it ‑‑ but I'll get a piece of authentic listening material. Then I'll get the student doing a close activity and listen to this weather forecast [inaudible 4:35] .
The other aspect is learner authentication. You can have an authentic piece of listening material and you can have an authentic task. For example, listen, your teacher has left a message on your phone about an excursion you're going to tomorrow. She gives the information right, make a note of the essential information like where to meet, what to bring, what to wear, and so on.
When you see the [inaudible 5:01] in the classroom doing that kind of thing, it does resemble something they might actually do in the world outside the classroom. That's not to say what I call pedagogical tasks are not reasonable to do in the classroom.
A lot of the techniques that got developed quite a few years ago things like jigsaw listening or spot the difference where learners have got two different versions of the picture and they have to describe the picture, and then figure out where the differences are.
I don't know about you, I've never seen anybody outside of the classroom [laughs] saying. We'll guess what the differences are in my picture. It's pedagogically defensible. It's good for practicing particularly with lower level learners. It's good news. It's quite easy to create picture challenges that get them practicing things like prepositions of place.
That's a typical one where you've got a beach scene or a picture of a...although that's good for activities. He's running, she's sleeping, he's swimming, practicing prepositions in place [inaudible 6:00] . We have two versions of somebody's bedroom, and with dining room and you have to exchange information to decide where things are.
Ross: Going back to authentic texts then, there are a lot of reasons why those might be too difficult for students to understand. I think a lot of teachers assume that in order to simplify text, you probably want to make it shorter and take out some of the more difficult words. But that's not always the case.
Taking out words or taking out difficult words can end up making a text more difficult rather than more simple.
David: Craig Shodron and his colleague Catherine Parker years ago, did a study where they were looking at simplified texts versus what they called elaborative modification or some fancy term on that. What that meant was that if you're using a listening text, might be a lecture or it could be a conversation, rather than dumbing it down.
More or less keep it to the original, authentic picture, you add in a lot of redundancy. In other words, you say the same thing. I'm doing it now. Right? You add in a lot of [inaudible 7:16] . In other words, you say the same thing using slightly different words and you do comprehension checks and you know what I mean? You know what I mean Ross?
[laughter]
Ross: Yes, I do understand. That redundancy idea is really nice, isn't it? Because you just demonstrated, it's also very natural as well. Something I think that happens quite a lot in spoken conversation anyway.
Let's talk about written texts for a moment. You are also [laughs] a very successful coursebook writer, David. How do you go about using texts when you write coursebooks?
I guess there's two schools of thought on this. One of them is decide on the language that you want to teach and then create texts around those words or grammar points or whatever, or the other end of the spectrum is finding authentic texts and then teaching from those.
David: What I've tried to do is to get texts that are engaging for the learners at a given level. For example, when I wrote the textbook for middle school to junior high kids who go for it, it was originally written for Latin America, but then the Ministry of Education in China decided that they wanted to adapt that one for use in schools in China.
I actually took a sabbatical for about 10 months. I just spent the whole time running back and forth to Beijing. Working with a team up there. Because it was co‑published deal with PP. As you probably know, you can't fit if you're writing for the schools in China. They have to be co‑published and so PP with the co‑publishers.
Anyway, so step number one was to find texts that would be engaging, Interesting, given subject matter, and so on for the kinds of learners that we were running the material for. Then make sure I was building in the appropriate vocabulary because when the text goes up for approval by the Ministry, they'll look through and I have long lists of pages and pages of vocabulary.
A lot of those vocab lists really don't make any sense. At one stage, I pointed it out.
Ross: Sorry, David. Those lists, are those coming from an exam board. Is that right?
David: From the Ministry of Education in China, yeah. There were very interesting conversations. Another project I was working on, I had this graded vocab list, and that had to be built in, and I pointed out that, for a start, there were certain vocab items that I wouldn't even know. I'm Australian. I wouldn't teach kids in that situation. Like, kangaroo was on the list, but computer wasn't. [laughs]
I know with corpus linguistics, that they have corporate now, that they don't have a lot more integrity, but a lot of them, the West's General Service List, that was written in about 1951, that was the most comprehensive fun.
A lot of the vocab lists that subsequently got developed came from that. Paul Nation's obviously the last word on that and, as Paul points out, it's not just frequency of the occurrence, but it's also what equals, I think, potency, how potent a particular vocab item is for learning.
Ross: So I suppose that sort of demonstrates the value of using authentic texts as the sort of building blocks of your coursebook, then you don't have those problems of inauthentic language. Authentic texts, I guess, almost by definition, are going to include more of the most frequent vocabulary in them and then that more frequent vocabulary, I guess, is going to be more useful to students?
David: Yeah. But you also get a lot of low frequency words. One of the books that I used, when it came out years ago in the UK, was Michael Swan and Catherine Walter's "Cambridge English Course" and, particularly in the higher levels, they actually used authentic listening materials. I remember one of them.
There was one lesson, I was prepping for, it must have been an interview, because they were working with CUP, it must have been an interview with somebody who worked in the CUP office.
You know, "OK. You're employed, so you've got to come and sit down and be interviewed."
This was pretty well‑unexpurgated. I was listening to it and whoever was interviewing said, "So, what do you do?" and the guy said, "I'm a printus reader." Well, what? I had a look at the tapescript. He was a printer's reader. He was a proofreader basically, for the publisher. [laughs]
Extremely low frequency vocab item, and at normal speed, and I thought, "This is going to freak my kids out." So I actually gave them the vocab.
Ross: I guess, there, David, you just hit on that authentic text can be really, really challenging for learners. Do you have any advice on how to use authentic text with, especially, very low level learners? How would you go about doing that?
David: One of the techniques that I use is this progressively structured listening, where first, the low level learners...one of the big challenges getting them over the...you know how it completely freaks you out. When I first came here to Hong Kong, 25 years ago, when I decided to try and start learning Cantonese by myself, without taking regular classes or anything.
It was just like this stream. I couldn't segment the stream of language in any way that made sense for a long time. Until I enlisted the help of some of my native‑speaking colleagues and so on. One of the techniques I used to use was to say, I'm going to play you five little forte conversations. Three of them are in English and two of them are not.
You have to just listen and all you have to do is to be able to pick which ones are English, then of course, if the distractors are Hindi and Arabic, that's a lot easier to do than if the distractors are German or Dutch. I remember the first time I ever went to Amsterdam. I thought I could swear, sounded so English [laughs] but it wasn't.
When they can do that, they realized that they can get some level of me even just identifying which conversations are English in which are and then maybe the next level, you might get them to identify how many speakers there are.
Again, if there are three males or three females, that's how to do if there is a male or female and adult and a kid, then you get the missing four key words, you get them identifying whether the conversation is asking for directions to a hotel or asking directions to supermarket.
As they start to get more relaxed then they're prepared to get the message. When you're listening to your first language, you don't listen to every big word. It depends on purpose for listening as well then you get the idea about listening just for gist or listening for specific information.
Once they've listened to it, a text four or five times and they've done different things with the text through to some kind of information transfer, filling in a table or whatever, or the example I gave earlier about taking down key information from a mobile phone message, then they start to develop good listening skills in the target language.
Ross: One more time, everyone that was David Nunan. If you enjoyed that and you'd like to find out more from David, check out his website, www.davidnunan.com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.