8/13/2019 Authentic Materials Assignment

1/3

Vicki Jade Stevenson

Authentic Materials

For my authentic materials lesson I choose to useLonely Planet travel guides as my authentic

material. I thought I would use these to review the future formgoing toand practice travel

vocabulary. I choose to do this because these were topics that had already been visited in thecourse book (Headway Intermediate students book, p39,43, 65) and I also thought this topic

would be relevant to the learners as they would all have some experience at planning and

making a journey at some time in their past. The vocabulary would also be useful for them

when planning their trip home or their next holiday. I was also able to incorporate a writing

task into this lesson which was a skill they had been lacking practice in over the past few

weeks.

I choose to use receptive skills to prepare for my main productive skills task. As these skills

were only to be used in preparation for the main task I decided to use tasks that involved

using skimming and scanning techniques. We use skimming to identify main ideas in a text

without having to read the text word by word. I got the students to use this technique by

giving them an itinerary for an imaginary holiday I had planned, to assist the class in

preparing for their own. The aim of this task was for students to identify things we need to

plan for when we are going on holiday. The ideas I hoped that they would extract from the

text were accommodation, means of transport, location and sights to visit or people to meet.

Scanning is used to identify key words or ideas in texts and involves looking quickly througha text for specific information. Students were asked to use this technique by scanning through

a travel guide to find location, means of transport, accommodation and sights to visit in a trip

they were planning. For this activity I asked students in groups to choose 3 locations in the

country of the travel guide they had been provided with. They then had to find the ways they

would travel to and from these locations, where they would stay and one sight to visit in each

location. The aim of this activity was to provide a skeleton for the writing activity that

followed. I used skimming and scanning because the use of these kinds of techniques can

help the learner to improve their reading comprehension and take in the foreign language.

Grellet comments on this

One of the most important points to keep in mind when teaching

reading comprehension is that there is not one type of reading but

several ... Students will never read efficiently unless they can adapt

their reading speed and technique to their aim when reading. By

reading all texts in the same way, students would waste time and

fail to remember points of importance to them because they would

absorb too much.

(Gellet 1981:17)

8/13/2019 Authentic Materials Assignment

2/3

Vicki Jade Stevenson

The main aim of my lesson involved using productive language skills as I decided to focus on

writing as the main skill in my lesson. To prepare for the final task I asked students in their

groups to write down the information I had asked for in their scanning task. To assist them I

provided them with a handout to remind them of the information they were looking for in the

travel guide their group had been given. Doing the task in this way meant that they were

gathering information (from the travel guide) and ordering it in a manner that it could be used

as a draft for their final writing task. Harmer suggests the importance of students planning

what they are going to write

we will want to involve them in the process of writing. In the real

world this typically involvesplanning what we are going to write,

drafting it, reviewing and editing what we have written then producing

a final version... We need to encourage students to plan, draft and edit...By doing so, we will help them to be better writers.

(Harmer 2007: 113)

Once students had completed the scanning and produced a draft for their writing I set them

the main writing task. The aim of this task was for students to write a travel itinerary for a

holiday in the future. They were told to use the information they had gathered as a group as

the draft and to complete this task individually. At the end of this task I took away the pieces

of work for marking. These pieces of written text prove that I met the aims of my lesson and

are included in the final part of this assignment together with a lesson plan that clearly

explains the aims of this lesson. Once I collected the writing I preceded to marking them

using a correction code I devised after obtaining ideas for Tricia Hedges book Writing (pg

152). My correction code can also be found at the end of this assignment. Correction codes

are a great way to get students to think about their mistakes, and to get them to have another

go at getting them correct. When correcting writing however it is important not to over

correct as students can become demotivated. It is best to focus on correcting the target

language only if too many errors have occurred. In a perfect world, if time allowed I would

have asked students to try and correct their errors and produce a final draft of their writing.

In my authentic materials lesson I have achieved successfully integrating a wide range of

skills. As well as the skills already mentioned, I integrated grammar by focusing on the future

formgoing toand speaking by putting the students into pairs at the end of the lesson to

discuss the holidays they had planned. The feedback and personal assessment of this lessonwill help me to address the strengths and weaknesses of my integrated skills lesson and assist

8/13/2019 Authentic Materials Assignment

3/3

Vicki Jade Stevenson

me in reflecting on these and producing better integrated skills lessons in the future. My

choice of authentic material was one that could have caused difficulty for the students. But by

breaking the lesson down and giving clear instructions I made it accessible to the students

and clearly met my lesson aims.

Bibliography:

Grellet,F. (1995)Developing Reading Skills. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Harmer, J (2007) how to teach english.Essex, Pearson Education Limited.

Hedge, T (1997) Writing.Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Authentic Materials:

Lonely Planet:Brazil (2008). London, Lonely Planet Publications Ltd.

Lonely Planet:India (2007). London, Lonely Planet Publications Ltd.

Eyewitness Travel:Japan (2009) London. DK.