Book Overview

The way textbook compilers design and offer the contents of a language course, or the manner in which language teachers calibrate them to the learners command of English may not precisely correspond to the integrity of the language. On the one hand, compilers select pieces of language use and, based on their worldview and psychological foundations of learning, they make reading passages, conversations, grammar points, cultural notes, etc. However, what happens in real language learning is the continuous flow of interactions produced by the human participants; textbook are limited in their offer but the environment is not. On the other hand, language teachers often make attempts to innovatively produce a life-like setting in the classroom; from their early lesson plans to the final scoring of the written or oral productions of the learners, they find themselves in a mode compensating for the real-life interactions, characteristic of the sociopragmatic environment around us. They are usually successful to the extent that the learners are finally ready to engage in social interactions with internalized cliché phrases. Simply stated, what appears to be missing is what we presume to be the authenticity in language teaching. The concept of authenticity is overviewed in some detail with reference to related works, in chapter one. As a relative conceptmaterialized within each context with the interaction of its participants, it cannot be defined similarly for all contexts, Also, it is assumed thatany text taken out of its original context and away from its intended audience automatically becomes less authentic. In general, literature on authenticity implies that authenticity is of pragmatic variation which cannot be defined in vacuity, and its defining characteristics lie in the context.