Authentic Materials In Teaching. Using authentic materials is one of the mainstays of an imaginative and motivating higher level course but rarely features at levels lower than intermediate. There is nothing wrong with the materials in coursebooks but there is a need to expose your students to language that is not graded specifically for their level.
Authentic materials provide real life examples of language used in everyday situations. Authentic materials can be extremely useful when teaching a foreign language class. By definition authentic materials are those that mimic what students would find in the outside world.
There are several reasons for this primarily a kind of fear that students will panic when faced with language that is largely unfamiliar and a feeling that to prevent this the language should be edited to the students level.
It is not the language of coursebooks which has been graded to a certain level. While it s of course necessary to approach many grammar topics with more traditional textbooks using authentic materials in the target language has many varied benefits. Authentic materials are often more recent and can therefore be more interesting to students as they pertain to current events that are of interest to them. Authentic materials expose your learners to real language as it is used in the real world.
