Authenticity in the adult ESOL classroom and beyond

ESOL classrooms mustcompensate for this lack with instruction and materials that reflect theinteractional realities of the world outside and provide affordances forauthentic communicatio

Authenticity in the Adult ESOL

Classroom and Beyond

in their new second language both for social and interpersonalencounters and in bureaucratic and institutional settings such as jobinterviews and medical consultations These needs are not adequatelymet by invented or oversimplified functional materials which flattenout interactional complexity Rather, materials should be researchbased so that they exemplify the social relations and discourse routines

of everyday and institutional interactions

T his article considers the question of what counts as authenticity in theteaching of English to speakers of other languages (ESOL), both interms of content and the interactional environment of the classroom Itexamines the discursive challenges facing linguistic minority migrants insuperdiverse settings typical of western urban centres (Vertovec, 2006),and the pedagogic instruction and materials which are intended toaddress these challenges For migrants, the English language classroomoffers several opportunities, two of which we focus on in this article: first,the opportunity to develop the voice (or voices) needed for authenticself-expression, in English, in social and interpersonal encounters, andsecond, the opportunity to close the gap between fleeting asymmetricalencounters (often mediated through interpreters) and the ability tomanage the extended institutional interactions required to negotiatewelfare, medical, and work-related communications Many migrantshave little interaction with the majority population (Baynham et al.,2007; Bremer, Roberts, Vasseur, Simonot, & Broeder, 1996; Norton,

2000;) and lack opportunities for lifelong and ‘‘lifewide’’ discoursesocialisation in English (Duff, 2008, p 257) ESOL classrooms mustcompensate for this lack with instruction and materials that reflect theinteractional realities of the world outside and provide affordances forauthentic communication in class.

In order to explore the issues arising from this challenge we revisit thedebate about authenticity in language teaching, placing some of thequestions raised in that debate against the background of languagelearning in migrant contexts In the concluding section of our discussion

we focus on the production of a particular genre, that of narrative, as a way

of illustrating several points made in the article about authentic language,pedagogic materials and their relevance to migrant learners

Some of the questions we explore are

N What counts as authenticity in the ESOL classroom?

N What does research tell us about the features of spoken interaction

in contexts such as workplaces, medical consultations, and jobinterviews, and how does this research inform ESOL pedagogy?

N What are the challenges and barriers to turning real-life, authenticlanguage into pedagogic materials?

N What kinds of classroom practices facilitate ESOL learners in theirdevelopment of an authentic voice across both institutional andeveryday settings?

We draw on several large-scale pieces of research and relateddevelopment projects carried out in 2003–2007: a study of 40 ESOLclassrooms in London and the north of England (Baynham et al., 2007),

a study of over 200 doctor–patient interactions in family practices inLondon (Roberts et al., 2005), and a study of language and ethnicity in

60 job interviews for low-paid work throughout the United Kingdom(Roberts & Campbell, 2006) These large corpora of institutionalencounters are examined alongside current ESOL curricular materials

in order to consider the authenticity of the latter and their relevance tothe needs of linguistic-minority adults

AUTHENTIC PEDAGOGIC MATERIALS

In this article, we explore two different sides of authenticity inlanguage teaching The first regards the issue of what counts asauthentic materials, that is, texts and models for classroom use, andthe second is the question of authenticity with respect to self-expressionand the development of authentic voice The debate about authenticity

in teaching materials is a longstanding and sometimes contradictory one

in English language teaching There are three main strands to this

debate: (a) what counts as authenticity; (b) what counts as taskauthenticity; that is, what are learners being asked to do with curricularmaterials; and (c) the potential for authentic materials to produce anarrow and overly functional learning experience.

Communicative language teaching (CLT) promoted a preference forreal or authentic texts, that is, texts which have been produced by and/

or for expert users of the language for use outside of the classroom; thatthese were superior to texts devised for language teaching purposesbecame a strong ‘‘item of faith’’ (Cook, 1997) The promotion by someexponents of CLT of authentic texts as inherently superior has beencritiqued from several angles, all of which challenge the notion that theclassroom and pedagogic texts are in some way inauthentic or artificialwhen contrasted with the supposed authenticity of the world outside.Two of the chief criticisms stem from the question posed by Widdowson(1997) of how far a text can remain authentic once it is removed fromthe specific context in which it was uttered or written, and the question

of task authenticity (Breen, 1985; Taylor, 1994) i.e what matters is notwhether a particular text is authentic but whether a learner interactswith it in an authentic way

AUTHENTICITY AND SELF-EXPRESSION

The other notion of authenticity we refer to here is that of thedevelopment of self-expression and authentic voice Some critics arguethat the insistence in CLT on authentic materials can produce curriculawhich are too narrowly functionalist and which do not provideaffordances for learners to be themselves in the new language Cook(1997) argues that authentic language is not always the most appropriatefor pedagogic models, and that a focus on authentic texts has led to anoverly functional view of language at the expense of the creativelanguage play essential to learning Kramsch (1993) also makes a casefor the special nature of the language classroom as a place wherelearners should be allowed to be learners, that is, to creatively exploringthe hybrid ‘‘third spaces’’ between their first language/culture and that

of the target language/culture

We agree that the classroom has its own reality, interactionalimperatives and opportunity for creativity, and that authentic learning

is always less about materials and more about how they are used—nocutting and pasting into the classroom can replicate the lived experience

of actual interaction Indeed, our own data from ESOL classrooms(Baynham et al., 2007) revealed a marked contrast between the talkproduced by students when they spoke ‘‘from within’’—or in the words

of Charles Taylor (1991) in their ‘‘languages of personal resonance’’

(p 89)—about subjects which mattered to them, on the one hand and,

on the other, the talk which resulted from contrived activities such asdialogue building and role plays of supposedly real-life scenarios Theformer invariably produced longer and more complex turns than thelatter, even amongst low-level learners We return to this issue later inthe article (see also Cooke & Roberts, 2007)

A related concern is that shared by many ESOL and adult literacyeducators over the way in which authenticity translates in curricularmaterials into a sometimes dreary diet of pseudo real-life scenarios such

as shopping or filling in forms ESOL has, of course, historically beenconcerned with teaching migrants to navigate interactions and literacydemands in, for example, health settings and street bureaucracies such

as welfare offices and banks, and there is no doubt that this is a necessarypart of instruction, especially for new arrivals ESOL and adult literacyclassrooms are believed by many (see, e.g., Jacobson, Degener, & Purcell-Gates, 2003) to be more relevant and motivating if students use languageand texts produced for real purposes in the real world, as opposed tomaterials which are decontextualised or school only

However, the themes suggested as relevant to adult learners’ lives byJacobson et al (2003) rarely seem to step beyond the realms of shopping,cooking, cleaning, and basic civics; the question of powerful genres andregisters in texts and the inequality and marginalization faced by manyESOL and adult literacy students are not proposed as themes for classstudy or discussion Teaching confined to functional, survival-typesituations has been criticised for uncritically representing students aspassive consumers of welfare, for an overemphasis on problems, and forreproducing social inequality, that is, socialising migrants to take theirplace as low-paid, low-grade workers (Auerbach, 1986; Tollefson, 1986)

We argue, however, that, although the insistence that ESOL reflectstudents’ day-to-day lives has indeed led to humdrum prescriptivematerials, this, in itself, does not remove the need to raise awareness ofthe interactional challenges they face outside the classroom and to explorethese with the students The challenge is to do this in pedagogicallyinteresting ways and, importantly, with materials which reflect the patternsand structures of the discourse produced in real contemporary institu-tional encounters—it is to this we turn in the next section

RESEARCH-BASED MATERIALS

ESOL classrooms are faced with the question of how to preparelinguistic-minority adults for interaction in the world outside theclassroom, and none of the arguments against authenticity at any costchallenge the proposition that curricular materials aimed at developing

the communicative resources for students for use in real world contextsshould, at least, be research based Much of the material available forteaching is invented and presents an idealised interactional world in whichpeople use the same variety of standard English, everyone co-operates,migrants do not have to struggle for the right ‘‘to impose reception’’(Bourdieu, 1977, p 75), and all participants are equally legitimatespeakers This is particularly misleading in representations of interactionswhere power is held by the majority speaker because of his or her social orinstitutional position (Roberts et al., 1992; Bremer et al., 1996).

Invented, idealized interactions and scenarios are removed cally, culturally, and socially from the features of interaction in real-lifecontexts Carter (in, e.g., 1998) and Carter and McCarthy (1995, 2004)have written extensively about the lack of fit between pedagogicgrammars based on written language and the grammar of spokenEnglish Although they do not ignore the fact that ‘‘the leap fromlinguistics to pedagogy is far from straightforward’’ (Cook, 1998, p 57),they argue that at the very least learners should be exposed to naturallyoccurring talk and encouraged to become aware of its common features.Carter and McCarthy base their argument for the grammar of spokentalk on evidence collected for large corpora of spoken language such asthe British National Corpus (University of Oxford, 2005) andCANCODE (Cambridge University, 2009)

linguisti-We would argue that there are two kinds of evidence which must betaken into account when designing curricular materials: the evidencethat research provides through the collection of corpora and discourseanalysis and what learners themselves know about the real world which isidealized for them in their pedagogic materials The following extract,for example, from the Skills for Life ESOL learning materials(Department for Education and Shille [DfES], 2003 Entry 1) used inthe United Kingdom, raised laughter and ironic comments among thebeginners to whom it was presented in class They know, as well as domost other people, that such a straightforward interaction when booking

an appointment to see a doctor is somewhat unlikely within the currentU.K health system:

Receptionist: Hello Ashlea Surgery

Filiz: Hello, can I make an appointment for my daughter to see Dr

Green please?

Receptionist: Yes What’s the name?

Filiz: Gulay Akpinar

Receptionist: Can you spell her first name please?

Filiz: Yes It’s G-U-L-A-Y Gulay Akpinar

Receptionist: OK Dr Green’s next appointment is on Thursday morning.Filiz: Thursday OK

Receptionist: Right Is 9.30 OK?

Filiz: Yes, that’s fine Thank you very much.

(From DfES [2003] Skills for Life ESOL learning materials Entry 1, Unit 5, p 18)Although this invented interaction has useful elements, for example,how to make requests and how to spell out names, the text lacksauthenticity because the students are better informed than the materialswriters about the difficulty of getting an appointment with the familydoctor when they want The orderliness of the text belies the livedexperience of negotiating scarce resources

FROM AUTHENTIC LINGUISTIC DATA TO PEDAGOGY

We would argue, along with others working in language teaching inEnglish-dominant settings (Burns et al., 1997; Carter, 1998; Carter &McCarthy, 2004; Mawer, 1999; Newton, 2007) that, unlike inventedmaterials, curricular materials which draw on language data collected inreal-life contexts can act as an essential bridge between the classroomand learners’ real lives Pedagogic tasks based on real data providelearners with explicit awareness of features of institutional interactionwhich they otherwise have little chance of getting outside the classroom.Without tasks which make explicit the features of communication

in settings such as the workplace and medical consultations, many

of the processes and discursive demands of these interactions willremain hidden to linguistic-minority speakers By way of illustration,

in the following sections, we present two examples of pedagogicmaterial alongside extracts from transcripts of interaction which tookplace in a similar real-life scenario, followed by a comparison of both Wefollow these extracts with a discussion of the implications for ESOLpedagogy

ESOL AND BUREAUCRATIC ENCOUNTERS: DOCTOR– PATIENT CONSULTATIONS

The first examples deal with a medical consultation, a commonlytaught topic in ESOL lessons but one for which there are few pedagogicmaterials available; for example, the Skills for Life ESOL learningmaterials (DfES, 2003) contain no doctor–patient interaction at all.Extract 1—an invented dialogue taken from the series New Headway(Soars & Soars, 2000), a popular global textbook—is used by ESOLteachers in the absence of other material The dialogue follows a section

on vocabulary related to illness and is presented as a listeningcomprehension exercise which students are invited to use as a model

to practise and then invent their own dialogues

Extract 1

D5Doctor, M5Manuel

1 D Hello Come and sit down What seems to be the matter?

2 M Well, I haven’t felt very well for a few days I’ve got a bit of atemperature, and I feel just terrible I’ve got stomach ache as well

3 D Have you felt sick?

4 M I’ve been sick a couple of times

5 D Mm Let me have a look at you Your glands aren’t swollen Have yougot a sore throat?

6 M No, I haven’t

7 D Have you had diarrhea at all?

8 M Yes, I have, actually

9 D Have you had anything to eat recently which might have disagreedwith you?

10 M No I don’t think so Oh! I went to a barbecue a few days ago and thechicken wasn’t properly cooked

11 D It could be that, or just something that was left out of the fridge for toolong

12 M Yes, I started being ill that night

13 D Well, you should have a day or two in bed, and I’ll give you somethingthat will look after the stomach ache and diarrhoea Drink plenty ofliquids, and just take things easy for a while I’ll write you a prescription

14 M Thank you Do I have to pay you?

15 D No, no Seeing me is free, but you’ll have to pay for the prescription.It’s £6

16 M Right Thanks very much Goodbye

17 D Bye-bye

(From Soars & Soars (2000) New Headway Pre-Intermediate, Unit 8, p 124)

We contrast this invented interaction with the opening phase of a recorded real encounter between a local Londoner (K) and a familydoctor (D) whom she has not met before:

video-Extract 2

1 K yeah well its just um I’ve got flu or virus and

2 D oh dear what’s been happening

3 K um well I don’t know I was um going away for Easter and um I had apain in my back (.) in the lung and I had it bad once and um I thought

‘uh uh’ you know I’ll brush it off so I had a very very dry cough last weekwhen I went to work and er I couldn’t go in on the Wednesday and thenThursday and Friday I was coughing and coughing but nothing (.) hurt

me but last night I never slept at all and I was going to go up to G

hospital one minute its hard and one minute its soft and then when Icough (.) it nearly kills me so

10 D oh dear and when you say it’s hard and soft what do you mean by that1The contrast between the invented and real examples illuminates severalfeatures of real institutional discourse: how institutional discourseroutines change over time but for a period a certain routine becomesthe preferred model; how subtle means of self-presentation will affectthe social relationships that are negotiated in interaction (and possiblythe outcomes); and how linguistic and sociocultural knowledge arewired in together We look at each of these in turn

The most obvious contrast between the two is the difference in lengthbetween the presentation-of-symptoms phase In the constructed versionthis phase takes only three lines, whereas in the real example, even after

9 lines, the doctor’s intention is to elicit further telling of symptoms.Earlier doctor–patient studies suggested that doctors interrupt patientsearly on in this phase (after 18 seconds according to Beckman &Frankel, 1984) Recent more patient-centered initiatives have focused on

a much longer and detailed opening phase, encouraging patients todescribe and comment on their symptoms The presentation ofsymptoms, with local English-speaking patients, tends to follow amicro-discourse routine which consists of three aspects (Roberts et al.,2004): the description of symptoms, the context—including thecircumstances and history of the symptoms—and, crucially, the patient’sstance The patient’s stance consists of both affective stance, indicatingfeelings, and epistemic stance (Ochs, 1996), indicating the degree ofcertainty of knowledge, which often includes some aspect of self-diagnosis In the constructed example, the patient describes hissymptoms and refers very briefly to when they started He also displays,fleetingly, an affective stance: ‘‘I feel just terrible.’’ By contrast, the realpatient gives much more detailed symptoms and context and, mostsignificantly, displays her affective stance—‘‘it nearly kills me,’’ ‘‘youknow, I’ll brush it off’’—which both justify her coming in and presentsher as a worthy patient This attention to the moral self is common inlocal English-speaking patients but rarely present among linguistic-minority patients Indeed, their opening phases are consistentlydifferent from that of the local speakers, lacking the integration of thethree elements described earlier (Roberts et al., 2004) Thus, the subtleways in which self-presentation is achieved displays the patient as oneworthy of the doctor’s attention and care This analysis of self-presentation

in the opening phase of the consultation also shows how linguistic and

1 The video is from the video database for the Patients With Limited English and Doctors in General Practice project, funded by the Sir Sigmund Warburg Voluntary Settlement.

sociocultural knowledge work together We would argue that regardless ofwhether materials are real or constructed, if the learner’s attention is notdirected to these aspects of interaction, task authenticity cannot beachieved.

Although conversation analysis (CA) has made a special study of theorderliness of social interaction in doctor–patient communication(Heath, 1981; Heritage & Maynard, 2006; ten Have, 1989) from whichrelevant text materials can be derived, little attention has been paid tolinguistic and cultural variety Only within a comparative perspective,can the differences between local English speakers and those fromlinguistic minorities be highlighted So though corpora of realinteractions can help to create models, task authenticity can beaddressed only by studying these differences In other words, presenting

a text as an interactional model or comprehension task, as in the NewHeadway example, does not focus on those aspects of the interactionwhich may most clearly challenge learners’ assumptions about relevantand appropriate interactional behaviour In this instance, learners wouldneed to focus on integrating the three elements described above—that

is, the symptoms, the context, and patient stance (Roberts et al.,2004)—and to understand that patients are now encouraged to give a fairlyextended presentation of symptoms They would also need to know that

it is common practice to present the self as a worthy patient within thecultural norms of a free health service, and that such self-presentationmay help negotiate the asymmetrical health encounter

In summary, the constructed doctor–patient text, while displayingsome examples of patterns found in the real data, is simplified to such

an extent as to lose the essential elements which linguistic—minorityspeakers would need to successfully navigate such an encounter Time isconcertinaed into one or two minutes; the interaction is smooth with norepairs or misunderstandings, and both sides negotiate conditions formaking appropriate inferences from the other’s talk There are no issues

of power or discrimination and no intimation of how current proceduresand/or ideologies such as patient-centredness enter into the interac-tions In the next section, we show that a similar oversimplification—orindeed, distortion—occurs in materials designed to help ESOLapplicants in job interviews

ESOL AND JOB INTERVIEWS

This section again compares an invented example with a real one.The first extract comes from the Skills for Life ESOL learning materialsand is intended for students at the low-intermediate level

Extract 3

Interviewer: Good morning, Mrs Lee Did you have problems finding us?May: No, no problem at all

Interviewer: Good Well then, please take a seat

Interviewer: So, you want to work for ACE Stores? Have you worked in a

supermarket before, Mrs Lee?

May: No, but I worked in a shop I was a stockroom assistant.Interviewer: So why are you applying for this job?

May: Well, I enjoy my present job but it’s a long way from home It

takes me an hour to get to work This job looks interesting andit’s near home

Interviewer: I see Most staff here work early and late shifts Can you do

that?

May: Sorry, I don’t understand Could you explain?

Interviewer: Yes of course It means that some staff work from 8 in the

morning until 3 in the afternoon That’s the early shift Otherswork from 3 until 10 at night That’s the late shift So one weekyou work the early shift, the next week you work the late shift.May: I see That’s fine

Interviewer: Is there anything you would like to ask me?

May: Yes Do staff have to wear a uniform?

Interviewer: There’s a company T-shirt

May: And what about the pay? Do you pay weekly or monthly?Interviewer: Weekly

May: That’s fine

Interviewer: Do you have any more questions?

May: No, I think that’s all

Interviewer: Well, thank you for coming We’ll let you know in a couple of

2 C: mm well what p-between the two companies or

3 I: yeah

11 I: yeah

12 C: customer focus but I’ve sort of gone off on a tangent now

13 I: no it’s I mean the range of experience just shows you

14 C: mmm

15 I: in many ways that you’re used to

16 C: yeah I’m quite

17 I: having new things thrown at you

(adapted from Talk on Trial, Roberts & Campbell, 2006, p 103)

As in the doctor–patient extracts, the most obvious contrast is in terms oflength Whereas the whole invented job interview was over in a matter ofmoments, the real interview lasted 45 minutes, requiring both extendedanswers from the applicant and the capacity to respond to long and notalways coherent questions and comments from interviewers Indeed, thetwo examples contrast on almost every level The job interview in much

of the English-speaking world is designed around a competencyframework in which applicants have to demonstrate their competencies

in areas such as team working, self-organization, dealing with customersand, as in the example above, managing change Questions about whyyou want the job are now much less frequent, especially in the publicsector, and when they do occur, the preferred answer is designed aroundwhat the candidate can offer the company and not what suits thecandidate In the invented example, there is no attempt to elicit ademonstration of competence, nor any awareness of what such ademonstration would look like

Comparative studies of local English-speaking applicants and thosefrom linguistic minorities show that the former use two successfulstrategies in the job interview (Roberts & Campbell, 2006) First, theyintegrate three discourse types into their responses, blending institu-tional, professional, and personal discourses This is illustrated in thecandidate’s answer above (Turn 10) She introduces her response withinstitutional discourse (‘‘customer focussed and deadlines and under