Regional center for in- service training and retraining of teachers under the karakalpak state university

Authentic Materials
Authentic materials as those that were “not created or edited expressly for language learners”. We are entering the region of unavoidable messages, inaccessible linguistic constructs and language immersion and yet, it is affordable and advisable to our students. The main reason why this could work is that there surely are reading strategies, which are common to both L1 and L2 readers, including any language worldwide. Additionally, there exist other easy-to-acquire strategies to comprehend the foreign language discourse and a lot of immersion and speed reading practice before starting to gain overall understanding.
Leaving aside the levelling systems of other agents such as editorials and professional educators the teacher of the English classroom can be a good reading mediator between students and real or authentic materials in their second language. Although the reading program is primarily concerned with the learner autonomy (through self-assessment and natural approach to learning), the teacher’s intervention will solve out the problems with non-guided reading events that would risk students’ willingness and attitude towards the reading act. “Using real examples is important because these short texts will convey a message. They will help learners to understand that reading involves understanding a message, rather than just sounding out the letter of a word.”
The use of authentic materials in the classroom is directly linked to such theories as the “natural approach” to language and the “natural” learning process derived from adapted reading and interesting materials for young people. “Reading can serve as an important source of comprehensible input and may make a significant contribution to the development of overall proficiency.”
The natural approach consists in those practices applied to language acquisition better than learning the language. The distinction between learning and acquiring refers to the fact that any learning process would imply memorizing and studying rules and formulas, while the acquisition of a language is supposed to occur at the level of unconscious and during the natural use of the target language. According to Krashen and Terrell’s study the natural approach is divided into two main elements that specify the staging of the process of acquisition. Like the reading program presented here, they give importance first to comprehension. If the acquirer does not comprehend the language input, little is possible to do. First, comprehension issues have to be attended and the second element is production. Production is again divided in other progressive stages: halfway through the process teachers’ intervention in the text allows the reader to make such natural progress real. Of course this kind of texts will surely break students’ linguistic and content expectancies, but the teachers’ adaptation of the text might guarantee fewer problems without eliminating the engaging power of such tools.
Authentic materials are a motivational strategy, students might need knowing the implication of their improvements and how close to real use their performances are. Non-explicitly oriented materials for the classroom, like course books and impersonal graded literature, will hearten their curiosity not only for language issues but for content specific and cultural issues.