Abstract
Using authentic materials in teaching ESP is part and parcel of communicative approach methodology. Unadapted materials bring the classroom closer to real-life language use and overall make language learning more meaningful and engaging for students. The needs analysis of Ukrainian students, which shows that many of them wish to continue their studies in English language universities abroad, makes the use of authentic materials particularly relevant, as they model the situations that students can potentially face in their future professional life. The presence of a vast array of authentic materials available today is both a challenge and a benefit for teachers, since they have to choose the ones which would meet their students’ needs and expectations. Based on an ESP class taught to philosophy students, this article offers a suggestion on how to approach teaching presentation making skills and provides the practical outcome of using a TEDx talk in the ESP classroom. The featured talk, which focuses on today’s perception of stoicism, was followed by some tasks to promote students’ critical thinking and facilitate their future presentation planning, as well as by the students’ own presentations in which they had to make use of the strategies discussed in class. Listening to the genuine presentation and using it as a model for presentations of their own follows the principles of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), which can benefit students by its explicit emphasis on the content and gives them a chance to acquire syntax, lexis, and discourse style skills as a by-product of content-oriented learning.
Highlights
The use of authentic language materials in teaching a foreign language has been gaining popularity since the advent of communicative approach in the 1980s, when texts, artificially tailored for classroom purposes, were condemned as too unnatural, providing ―poor models of real language use, and obsessively concerned with the forms of the language, its grammar patterns, at the expense of more communicative features of the text‖ (Thornbury, 2005, p. 104)
The central issue of applying authentic materials in teaching ESP to philosophy students seems to coincide with Thornbury‘s remark on the specificity of using this sort of material in general, i.e. ―how to ensure that learners understood such texts, and how to decide which language features of these texts should be selected for teaching purposes‖ (Thornbury, 2005, p. 106), as authentic philosophy materials demand both a high level of the English language command, as well as a certain level of subject matter knowledge
Some may doubt the authenticity of TED materials from the perspective of their nonmandatorynativeness‘ or their increasing usage as official coursebook basis, these talks can be viewed as authentic in the way they concentrate on their content, not on a particular language feature needed to be a highlight of some linguistic analysis, and a talk may be produced by a non-native speaker of
Summary
The use of authentic language materials in teaching a foreign language has been gaining popularity since the advent of communicative approach in the 1980s, when texts, artificially tailored for classroom purposes, were condemned as too unnatural, providing ―poor models of real language use, and obsessively concerned with the forms of the language, its grammar patterns, at the expense of more communicative features of the text‖ (Thornbury, 2005, p. 104). The analysis of recent studies and publications Problems of using authentic materials in teaching English to university students of philosophy have been in the centre of attention of Prof. There is a contradiction in the way of referring to authentic language materials, since the latter can be viewed as ―texts produced by native speakers for a non-pedagogical purpose‖ Some may doubt the authenticity of TED materials from the perspective of their nonmandatorynativeness‘ or their increasing usage as official coursebook basis, these talks can be viewed as authentic in the way they concentrate on their content, not on a particular language feature needed to be a highlight of some linguistic analysis, and a talk may be produced by a non-native speaker of
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