There is a wide range of storybooks: from traditional fairy tales to fantasy stories, and from picture stories with no text to stories with rhymes. Ellis and Brewster (1991) have classified storybooks under three headings: narrative features, content, and lay-out.
However, the main text typology is the one that distinguishes between authentic and non-authentic texts.
On the one hand, Nunan (1989) describes authentic texts as those which have been produced for purposes other than to teach language.
On the other hand, a non-authentic text, in language teaching terms, “is one that has been designed especially for language learners” (Harmer, 1991). They are either adapted or simplified or written keeping in mind the language proficiency of the learners in question.
We can make a distinction here, however, between texts which have been made to illustrate particular language points for presentation (artificial) and those which appear to be authentic (simulated authentic).
The main aim of all our teaching is to enable our pupils to reach communicative competence. As the focus will be on assisting our pupils to do in class what they will need to do outside, the materials we use should reflect the world outside. In other words they should have a degree of authenticity, and this authenticity should relate to the text sources as well as to the pupils' activities and tasks.
This way, to foster the acquisition of communicative competence, the texts used with our students must at least be simulated authentic.
Comments