Creative Ways to Use Authentic Material

 It's no good trying to get your students fascinated by a text on the latest art movie if they are all fans of action films. You might as well save your time and energy and just use the text book!

Aren't authentic materials too difficult? Yes they are, but that's the point! Your text, written or recorded, is likely to be too hard, even, in some cases, for advanced students. The trick, regardless of the text used, is not to edit and grade the text, but to grade the task according to your students' abilities. This is for three reasons: most importantly, it reflects the kind of situation your students may face in an English-speaking environment, it saves you time and energy (more of an added bonus than a reason) and lastly it encourages and motivates your students when they can 'conquer' a real text.

When used correctly, authentic materials provide the flavor your class needs to complement the use of textbooks, worksheets and other foreign language teaching materials!
Maybe you’ve heard all about the activities you can do with authentic materials and how they increase student achievement, but you haven’t ventured to try them yet.
If it sounds a little intimidating, not to worry.
When people first think of authentic materials they usually assume that we are talking about newspaper and magazine articles. However, the term can also encompass such things as songs, web pages, radio & TV broadcasts, films, leaflets, flyers, posters, indeed anything written in the target language and used unedited in the classroom.

The materials used, will of course, depend on the 'usual' factors:

• topic
• target language area
• skills
• students' needs and interests