"Authentic Text Time in Adult Ed"-from TESOL Blog

http://blog.tesol.org/authentic-text-time-in-adult-ed/#more-7909

Authentic Text Time in Adult Ed

Posted on 25 April 2016 by Robert Sheppard

Adult learners, especially immigrants who have various competing priorities which may take precedence over English, need to see an immediate application for their new language. In many contexts, English can be a luxury; for adult immigrants, it cannot be. As teachers, we must approach it with an urgency and immediacy that might be unusual in, say, a business EFL program. A student-driven environmental/authentic text time is one way to add relevance, immediacy, and authenticity to your adult English classes.

My comments: Even to teenage learners, authentic texts seem more real and interesting.

The implementation is simple: Set aside a portion of each week, maybe 15 minutes, for students to bring in authentic texts. These could be anything from bills and notices that have come in the mail to student-made cell phone recordings of the announcements on the subway, to photos of billboards, to email correspondence. Anything that they’ve encountered in the world around them and felt a need or desire to understand.

My comments: Years ago, a former student who I taught only in his freshman year of high school, told me that he found in Canada, where he went after graduating from high school, that the English he had learned in school in Taiwan was  not very useful in daily life abroad. I believe that this is a common complaint about EFL.

You’ll probably get a lot of ideas, so encourage students to prioritize amongst themselves: Mine is just something from the back of the cereal box, but Carla has something from her son’s teacher, so she should go first.

Use these texts as starting points for teaching language points, pragmatics, and, importantly, other literacies. It’s increasingly expected that we will incorporate life skills such as financial literacy, digital literacy, and systems navigation skills into our English classes. This can be daunting for those of us who consider our area of expertise to be English, and who may be intimidated by the prospect of teaching in these other areas. But this kind of activity can help us to recognize that we really are qualified to teach many of these basic literacies, and they give us a concrete starting point.

A caveat: Teaching responsively and with authentic texts, it can be really easy for 15 minutes to turn into 45, and that’s not what we want here. Make sure you focus primarily on comprehension and pragmatics and limit the form-focused instruction to one or two of the most broadly useful language points.

- See more at: http://blog.tesol.org/authentic-text-time-in-adult-ed/#more-7909