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Reading Authentic Texts – 2
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15 thoughts on “Reading Authentic Texts – 2”
Actually 31,683 comments here since 2007. If you read them all by Christmas you will be awarded with a knighthood.
I am about to email you, Ben and a few others, the 4 pages from Shrum&Glisan: dry, dense text, filled with contradictions, and major flaws in their understandimg on how we learn languages.
It won’t take you until Christmas to read it, and I hope Eric will find in it his next round of ammunitions .
Catharina post some if not all of those four pages into the ACTFL thread. Open up some eyes. Provide a short background, something from your previous posts on this thread, to make your point crystal clear because the thread keeps losing shape each day a little more. Make them aware of the price of the book, too.
Ok. I will work on it tomorrow.
I emailed you, Eric, Robert, Diane N., and Louisa the 4 pages to look over. (Figured Grant needed a break). I find so much of what they’re saying misleading, and false. But sometimes I doubt of myself. Robert’s analysis makes me see things from a different angle.
And yes I will bring up the price again, $152 on Amazon. Now seriously!
Thanks, Catharina. I took a quick look at the pages. It is difficult to give a really good critique without also looking at the research. For example, I tried to look at the Herron and Seay study mentioned in the first paragraph, but Wiley Online Library wants $3.99 to rent the article for 48 hours and as much as $35.00 for a PDF – even though this was originally published in ACTFL’s Foreign Language Annals in 2008, and I am a member of ACTFL and have been since before 2008. Why do ACTFL members not have access to ACTFL’s publication?
Anyway, that first paragraph asserts “It has been well documented that students who listen to authentic oral segments, such as radio broadcasts, demonstrate significantly greater listening comprehension that do students who do not interact with authentic segments (Herron and Seay, 1991; Bacon, 1992b).” Sounds like pretty strong support for “authentic segments”, right?
Even though I wasn’t able to access the entire Herron and Seay article, I was able to read and copy the abstract:
“ABSTRACT The current study determined the effect of authentic, unedited radio features on student listening skills in the foreign language classroom. Twenty-three students in two classes of intermediate French participated in the research. The basic instructional approach and materials for the two classes of students were identical. The groups differed only in that classwork, in the experimental condition, was regularly supplemented with Champs-Elyseés, an unedited radio program produced in Paris. Student listening comprehension skills at the end of the fifteen-week semester were superior in the experimental condition as measured on two different aural tests of unedited native speech. Results confirmed that listening comprehension improves with increased exposure to authentic speech. The current study suggests that adjusting levels of speech (speed, content, and form) to students’ developing comprehension, while perhaps helpful to the intermediate-level foreign language student, might not be essential to improvement of listening skills.”
Once again, there is a ringing endorsement of the efficacy of listening to unedited radio programs. Note, however, the following statement: “The basic instructional approach and materials for the two classes of students were identical. The groups differed only in that classwork, in the experimental condition, was regularly supplemented with Champs-Elyseés, an unedited radio program produced in Paris.” In other words, the experimental condition provided that group with more input than the control group. That introduces a variable that the study leaders do not take into account: was the superior performance due to authentic aural input or due to comprehensible aural input, whether “authentic” or not.
There are a lot of other questions that arise, including the effect of acquisition level on the efficacy of “authentic segments”. I do not question that authentic resources can be used effectively in the classroom. After all, I use kicker.de every week to look at German soccer scores, but I also know how much preparation it takes to get students ready to interact with it. I wouldn’t do it if it were a short-term project because the amount of effort for both me and my students wouldn’t be worth it. It pays off as a year-long project, however. In my upper-level class I also use some black-line masters published by Klett Verlag, a German publisher, for use in German Middle Schools. I do not make them my sole material, and I do not necessarily leave them unedited.
Once again, I go back to the idea of emergent readers (and, in the case of foreign language, emergent listeners). We modify the text for native emergent readers (e.g. Children’s Bibles, Graphic novels). Why would we advocate forbidding this for second language acquisition? Isn’t that both hypocrisy and academic snobbery?
I really have to get my stuff ready for Saturday.
I’m useless in all of this because I have a, gasp, inherent distrust of research.
Why is it that someone’s “study” of 46 students is more accurate and valuable than a teacher’s anecdotal experience with hundreds, or thousands, of students?
Perhaps our insights are not “objective” enough. I agree. But I don’t think that objectivity is necessarily the best lens for viewing students. Perhaps intuition, empathy and other very human abilities can provide a very appropriate lens for viewing the potential of students. Through these lenses we can see potential that objectivity ALONE cannot begin to fathom.
I do not think that research is to be discarded. However, I do not think that research alone should determine the course of human interaction and development. And that is the direction we have been headed.
On that note, if folks are going to claim that what we should do is based on research, they darn well ought to show us the research.
with love,
Laurie
“The current study suggests that adjusting levels of speech (speed, content, and form) to students’ developing comprehension, while perhaps helpful to the intermediate-level foreign language student, might not be essential to improvement of listening skills.”
Thanks, Robert.
Champs-Élysées Audio Magazine is good example of an authentic listening source which is transcribed and extensively glossed. This proves to me that authentic materials may need a very large scaffold.
Below is a description copied from:
http://french.about.com/cs/listening/fr/champselysees.htm
(I subscribe for about a year and this describes the components as I remember them.)
“A subscription to Champs-Élysées includes two distinct components:
1. 60-minute audio tape or CD (your choice) filled with interviews, articles, and music, specially chosen and edited to help you practice and perfect your French listening skills, while improving your grammar and vocabulary. The audio is done entirely by native French-speaking professional broadcasters.
2. 64-page magazine containing a complete transcript of the audio and a glossary: the difficult vocabulary and expressions are highlighted in bold in the transcript, then translated and usually elaborated upon in the glossary. The glossary is a key element of Champs-Élysées – it takes up more than half of the magazine, and many of the entries are mini-features in themselves.
Each monthly issue contains about a dozen short features covering diverse topics in French current events and culture, including politics, business, theater, music, and sports.”
Please send it to Grant as well Catharina. He will need it. He doesn’t get off so easily just because he has a gig this weekend and he has to make extra mugs for all the pottery orders he is filling for us for Christmas.
Many of us would probably like to bail on this ACTFL thing right about now. We all have our regular lives and responsibilities and this is like a 20 inning ball game and we all want to see who wins and just go home. But we can’t. We have to keep at this. It’s way too important. We can’t know what will happen, ours is simply to keep reading and keep pointing things out on that site as they occur to us.
Others need to step up because Robert and Eric and Grant and those posting on that site regularly can’t do this alone. I have been unable to get on and comment. Every time I get back on with ACTFL’s help, I am back off, disabled every day. But I’m working on it and so should the rest of us.
We don’t have to win. With these people, there is no winning. We have never won and I don’t think ACTFL is going to lay down anytime soon while waving a big white flag and yelling with heads facing down, “OK you rabble are right, we don’t have any research to back up our claims! What do we do now?”
They could never do that because there are so many people back behind the front lines whom we haven’t seen – and won’t see – who make lots of money and prop up their professional images off of thinking in terms of that ACTFL party line thinking. Notice how it is all connected in some way to publications, things book companies make.
ACTFL is big. That’s a lot of people there and if we were to “win” it would be akin to turning one of those super oil tankers in the middle of the ocean around with a few small tugboats, which I apologize if I’ve used that image before. Even if 200 of us from this PLC started writing in regularly, nothing would happen. It can’t be done.
And yes they DO HAVE TIES to the textbook industry which is standing back from this fray on the very back of the game board right now, clutching dollars, because what we say impacts their bottom line. They don’t want anyone to see their hands in this dispute, but be certain that if you look at the book prices that Catherine mentioned and at Met, Curtain and Phillips and others you will see that that piece fits into the mix of this discussion and no doubt about it. They hide very well, but they are there, watching from the roofs of their banks.
So again, we won’t win and we don’t need to. We just need to keep throwing rocks at that big man who is so much bigger than we are, the guy with one eye going in one direction and the other off in another and the money caught up in his beard. Keep throwing rocks at him and don’t run away.
With each rock we throw, another ACTFL member may push back from their computer screen and rethink what they are doing. That is what we are doing right now, helping teachers who may have never heard of SK do so in a serious way. Does anyone really think that SK has braved through over thirty years of derision and he is still standing tall for nothing? Now it is shifting in his direction. Vague statements against his position, the marginalizing of his research, all that is starting to cave in under the weight of change in favor of comprehensible input based instruction. Now is no time to quit pushing for this change.
And Grant has a great slingshot he made in his pottery studio – the same one that is going to provide so many AMERICAN MADE presents to our loved one this year, as per:
https://www.facebook.com/boulangerpottery
so Catharina send him that information too. We should all read it, really. Why not?
I will send it to Grant.
I am thinking. thinking. So much is intuitive.
The research may well say one thing. Only the most experienced, seasoned teachers could tackle all those “tasks” that would be required before reading an authentic- unedited- text while staying 90%+ in the TL . And the students would have to be exceptionally focused.
The reality looks quite different in our schools.
ACTFL should be so happy! Eric our hero, is blowing some fresh air into the stale boring conversations on that stale boring ACTFL forum. So we don’t all agree. What else is new?
Eric got us all thinking and reflecting on what we do.
Here’s what Paul Nation wrote me today and what I posted to ACTFL:
Authentic materials are fine if the vocabulary load is not too heavy. However, for learners with a relatively small vocabulary size (less than 3300 word families for example), the vocabulary load is too heavy.
Learners need substantial input for incidental vocabulary learning (see the latest issue of the web journal Reading in a Foreign Language for my recent article about this). This input needs to be at the right level with not too much unknown vocabulary preferably less than 2% of the running words. Unsimplified texts do not provide this favourable density and they include hundreds of unknown words.
Authenticity can come from the text itself (it is written for native speakers) or from the interaction of the learner with the text (they enjoy it, comprehend it, criticise it, etc. as an authentic reading experience). Overly difficult texts do not provide authentic reading experiences.
Best Wishes
Paul Nation
Me: So, authentic resources are okay once a kid knows 3,300 word families. In other words, none of our kids in a 4 year high school program!!!
I’ve asked him how he would respond to the NECTFL Director who questioned the validity of the lexical set studies. I hope Nation gives me something good 😉
“Authenticity can come from the text itself (it is written for native speakers) or from the interaction of the learner with the text (they enjoy it, comprehend it, criticise it, etc. as an authentic reading experience). Overly difficult texts do not provide authentic reading experiences.”
This is deep…and has deep implications. That enjoyment and comprehension are a measure of authenticity in a reading experience. I’m on Paul Nation’s team now.
Me too! Catharina sent me the pages from the textbook she mentioned. It is really outrageous… including documentation of supposedly-successful reading of authentic literature within the first few weeks of French class. There was mention of how entirely unchanged radio broadcasts played for beginning-level students helped them develop listening comprehension. (I would like to see the author try educated, native-speaker reading with Chinese beginning readers and see what the students do with it.) The stress on using high-level authentic resources (not even children’s books, or simpler things like a menu) with early readers is really shocking to me.
So I’m glad to hear that Paul even has an argument for what authentic really is – not merely that by and for native speakers.
That is what I meant several days ago when I used the term authentic dialogue. Authentic has to do with using the language to communicate. Authentic texts are those being used by the writer to communicate a message.
I want the FL Methods Course endorsed by ACTFL to be revoked.
And I want my money back.