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Authentic Materials and Cultural Content in EFL Classrooms

By: Prof. B.A. Mey Reynolds Panton
e-mail: meymrlimon@gmail.com

Ferit Kilickaya, author of the article Authentic Materials and Cultural Content in EFL Classrooms said that teachers should use authentic materials in the classrroms since this will: have a positive effect on learner motivation, provide authentic cultural information, provide exposure to real language, relate more closely to learners needs and support a more creative approach to teaching.

On the other hand, sometimes these materials have a different language, unneeded vocabulary items and complex language structures, which give teachers in lower leve classes, a lot of work and trouble. Nevertheless, they should be used at post-intermediate level, since most students master a wide range of vocabulary in the target language and all of the structures. Also, learners feel better with authentic materials helping them involve in real language, and encourage them to read for pleasure especially topics of their interest. Students should be aware that learning a language is not just learning its grammatical rules, vocabulary items and so on.

I agree because using authentic materials, students will be dealing with real world situations since that represents have them reading newspapers, magazines, watching videos, listening to talks or discussions and so on.

Choosing a Textbook and other Printed Materials

By Prof. B.A. Mey Reynolds Panton
e-mail: meymrlimon@gmail.com

According to Curtain and Pezola who wrote the article Choosing a Textbook and other Printed Materials, selecting a textbook is an important task for the foreign language teacher at any level. Nevertheless, it is more difficult in the elementary school since there are few books to select from. For this reason, many of those schools develop a curriculum that does not depend on the use of a textbook, at least for one or two years. Although, others invested money to design materials for the whole school sequence. Based on that situation, publishers are producing materials to solve the problem.

On the other hand, at the middle school level they adapt the materials that are design for the high school, to use with the beginners. I believe institutions should include a space in teachers schedule in order to, use that time to design materials according to students level (tailor-made). This will give them the opportunity to focus on specific issues to give students useful and  interesting information, base on real world situations.