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Authentic Material

There are many references to authentic material in the ELT literature. Books and journals contain thorough explanations of why it should or should not be included in lessons, and how it is to be used or best exploited. But those authors who support the use of authentic material have in common one idea: "exposure". In other words, the benefit students get from being exposed to the language in authentic materials.
The definition of authentic materials used in this paper is taken from Peacock (1997): materials that have been produced to fulfill some social purpose in the language community.
Widdowson's (1990) differentiation of the terms "authentic" and "genuine material" has been a seminal one in the field so I should like to mention it here: Authentic would be material designed for native speakers of English used in the classroom in a way similar to the one it was designed for. For example, a radio news report brought into the class so students discuss the report on pollution in the city where learners live.
Most of the time, though, this material is used in a genuine way, in other words, not in the way it was intended, but in a somewhat artificial way. For example, a news article where the paragraphs are cut up and jumbled so students have to put them back together in the correct order.
Another view is the difference between artificial and authentic materials (see Shortall, 2001).

Advantages
Using authentic material in the classroom, even when not done in an authentic situation, and provided it is appropriately exploited, is significant for many reasons, amongst which are:
Students are exposed to real discourse, as in videos of interviews with famous people where intermediate students listen for gist.
Authentic materials keep students informed about what is happening in the world, so they have an intrinsic educational value. As teachers, we are educators working within the school system, so education and general development are part of our responsibilities (Sanderson, 1999).
Textbooks often do not include incidental or improper English.
They can produce a sense of achievement, e.g., a brochure on England given to students to plan a 4-day visit.
The same piece of material can be used under different circumstances if the task is different.
Language change is reflected in the materials so that students and teachers can keep abreast of such changes.
Reading texts are ideal to teach/practise mini-skills such as scanning, e.g. students are given a news article and asked to look for specific information (amounts, percentages, etc.) . The teacher can have students practice some of the micro-skills mentioned by Richards (1983), e.g. basic students listen to news reports and they are asked to identify the names of countries, famous people, etc. (ability to detect key words).
Books, articles, newspapers, and so on contain a wide variety of text types, language styles not easily found in conventional teaching materials.
They can encourage reading for pleasure because they are likely to contain topics of interest to learners, especially if students are given the chance to have a say about the topics or kinds of authentic materials to be used in class.

Disadvantages
The disadvantages mentioned by several writers are:
They may be too culturally biased, so unnecessarily difficult to understand outside the language community.
The vocabulary might not be relevant to the student's immediate needs.
Too many structures are mixed so lower levels have a hard time decoding the texts.
Special preparation is necessary which can be time consuming.
With listening: too many different accents.
The material can become outdated easily, e.g. news.
There are many headlines, adverts, signs, and so on that can require good knowledge of the cultural background. Instances of this abound in the media, such as headlines that many times use abbreviations (P.O.W., M.I.A., G.O.P. and so on).

Sources of Authentic Materials
In today's globalized world, examples abound, but the most commonly used perhaps are: newspapers, TV programs, menus, magazines, the internet, movies, songs, brochures, comics, literature (novels, poems and short stories), and so forth.
I would like to look at some authentic materials in a bit more detail and then move on to a variety of sample tasks .