Listening Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

Myth 7 - Students should listen only to authentic materials.

M Y T H 7 Students should listen only to authentic materials. In the Real World . . . I was listening to the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty one day after working on this book (I do listen to new music, too, but sometimes a beautiful Great Lakes spring afternoon requires perspective). My brain hadn’t shut down the “listening research” network yet, so I, much against my will, experienced sporadic connections between the songs on the album and the topic of listening. It began with the line in “Sugar Magnolia” that compares a woman’s dancing to “a Willys in four-wheel drive.” Leaving aside the aptness of the comparison, I began to wonder how many of my Ohio-born students knew what a Willys was (the original Jeep). Then “Operator” came on, in which the singer is seeking a phone number. How many young people have spoken to a telephone operator? Though this music is 40 years old, it’s still on sale. It’s “authentic.” But it might as well be written in Martian. Perhaps I’m being perverse, but what would happen if you tried to present this authentic material in class, or if a language learner found it at a yard sale? What schema is activated by the word operator? If you had students write down everything 132 they knew about operators or Willys, how far would you get? You could go the bottom-up route and look up the words in a bilingual dictionary , but I doubt proper names of defunct car companies would be there, and I wonder about the telephone meaning of operator. (I think of the confused look on the face of my Japanese student who had found the circular-area meaning of circus—Piccadilly Circus—and not the tents and elephants one.) The issue of authenticity in materials has plagued language teaching for decades. In staff rooms in Asia and the United States, I’ve heard colleagues declare that they would only teach with authentic materials. They scorned textbooks as contrived, unrealistic. They spent enormous amounts of time scouring newspapers and magazines for authentic articles. In the pre-Internet era, expatriate teachers had friends send videocassette tapes of television programs and movies from home. I, too, have tried to use authentic materials when I can. I forget where we got them, but in 1980s Tokyo we had homemade tapes of the TV shows Miami Vice and Family Ties we used for listening practice. A couple of years ago while living in Taiwan, I bought a Friends DVD at the local video store to show in the last classes. I think authentic materials have a definite place in language teaching, but I think often that place is mostly about motivation. Students, at least some students, like to see the cultural products of the languages they are studying, especially if those products (movies, TV) are designed for and feature characters the same age as they are. In some cases, attaining the ability to consume popular culture is why people are studying a foreign language . For example, many Americans like Japanese anime and manga (animation and comic books) and study Japanese largely to be able to understand them. Students in Asia learn Japanese or Korean to understand pop music from those countries. Some students, however, really don’t care about the target culture; they are more interested in using English to speak to other English learners than to native English speakers , in using English as an International Language. Though I recognize that understanding authentic material is a goal most students have, I don’t think we are well served by a rigid insistence that all classroom materials be authentic and I’d like to look at Myth 7: Listen only to authentic materials. ~ 133 that issue in this chapter. I want to note that this chapter comes out of a joint presentation and subsequent thinking and revising I have done over the years with my former colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, Lionel Menasche (Brown & Menasche, 1993). What the Research Says . . . Authenticity in materials design and learning activities has never been far from the thoughts of ELT professionals. Indeed, several positive effects have been claimed to flow from such authenticity, among them: increased student motivation due to face validity (the material looks real and is therefore exciting), provision of appropriate cultural knowledge , exposure to “real” language, attention to future student needs, and...