Excerpt from Practices That Work (Garza): Tapping into Learner Motivation with Authentic Texts

 

Excerpt --

# 14

 

Tapping into Learner Motivation with Authentic Texts

 

Olla Al-Shalchi (University of Texas at Austin)

 

Using authentic material in the language classroom is essential. It not only helps build learners vocabulary and grammar but gives them an insight into the culture of the region. During the early stages in learning a language, it may be challenging to find appropriate authentic materials, but when learners are at the Advanced level aiming toward Superior-level proficiency, that challenge no longer exists and the sky is the limit with the authentic texts available. Additionally, authentic material motivates learners to continue learning the language because they see that they are closer than ever to reaching professional proficiency. Learners feel accomplished and proud when they are able to work with texts that were intended for native speakers.

At the Advanced level, learners after have mastered the most common grammatical structures and have learned thousands vocabulary items, and it is important to have them continue to be pushed to add on their vocabulary and expand their knowledge of the region as much as possible. It is with language that we are able to comprehend and learn and spark a fire and dig deeper in an area of interest. For this reason, the topics that learners study need to be areas of interest, current and relevant, and allow for debate and discussion in which there is no easy solution.

In my own Arabic class, learners are exposed to topics that they may not have thought about and/or may have limited background information on. For example, I teach a fourth-year Arabic class in which learners are presented with units about various societal issues that affect communities throughout the world. Learners learn about women’s rights, artificial intelligence, living through a pandemic, and poverty and hunger. All of these units are studied from various points of view: historical, economical, religious, and literary, for example.

To give a clearer understanding of how authentic texts are used, I present to you more detail about the unit that deals with poverty and hunger, and the many different angles that are studied within this unit. Learners learn about the role of different religions in terms of poverty and hunger and what these religions say about helping those in need. Televised interviews with scholars and religious figures are viewed. From an economical perspective, learners examine which countries and ethnicities have the greatest percentages of people living below the poverty line and factors that contribute to poverty and how to prevent it in the future. From a literature perspective, learners read Ghassan Kanafani’s short, powerful novel, Men in the Sun, which tells the story of different men who are so desperate to go after a better life to get away from living in poverty that they are smuggled in an empty water tank in the scorching summer day across a desert. None of the men survive the journey, and although the story is non-fiction, it is a clear representation of the despair and struggle that so many people went through during the 1950s-1960s and continue to go through. Learners also study in depth at the aftermath of the Iraqi society dealing with U.N. sanctions which lead the country to have tone of the worst healthcare systems, suffering of malnutrition, an increase in death rates, and a lack in education. A native doctor of the country was invited as a guest speaker in class, and learners were able to hear firsthand how it was to live under these conditions. Not only were they learning about a region they did not know much about, they were learning about how an entire society did/did not survive such strict sanctions.

In this one unit, not only are learners exposed to the topics of hunger and poverty, but they do so in a way that gives them a representation of a variety of facts from different points of view all within the same topic. This practice provides learners with a thirst to continue learning about the topic, all while being committed to using authentic texts in the world language. Learners are motivated to continue study of the language because they find these topics and materials—entirely in the target language—interesting and compelling.

 

Further Reading

Arechiga, Debbie. 2012. Reaching English Language Learners in Every Classroom: Energizers for Teaching and Learning. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315856186

Kanafānī, Ghassān. 1991. Men in the sun and other Palestinian stories. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.