Abstract
Current language teaching pedagogy seems to give a lot of weight to the use of authentic materials. This article describes how a group of bilingual postgraduate students were assisted in improving their writing skills in English by means of a pedagogical approach that utilized a wide variety of texts published online. It discusses the methodology used as part of this approach and the outcomes of the action research study it formed part of. Despite its limitations, to a large extent this small-scale study confirms the idea that the use of authentic texts in ELT can prove beneficial, especially if students are empowered to choose the texts they would like to base their learning on.
Highlights
After growing concerns with the rather poor level of English writing proficiency amongst bilingual students enrolling on a wide variety of courses in which English is the main language of instruction and assessment, the Faculty of Arts within the University of Malta developed a course aimed at improving students’ writing skills
By means of a small-scale action research study, I attempted to explore whether this could be achieved with a selection of postgraduate students enrolled on the writing skills course
Larsen-Freeman (2000) affirms that Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) advocates the use of authentic materials as a means of tackling ‘the typical problem that students cannot transfer what they learn in the classroom to the outside world’ (p. 132)
Summary
After growing concerns with the rather poor level of English writing proficiency amongst bilingual students enrolling on a wide variety of courses in which English is the main language of instruction and assessment, the Faculty of Arts within the University of Malta developed a course aimed at improving students’ writing skills. Wong, Kwok and Choi (1995) describe how the use of authentic materials at tertiary level can help develop students’ language skills and guide them to apply these skills to situations outside the classroom. After growing concerns with the rather poor level of English writing proficiency amongst bilingual students enrolling on a wide variety of courses in which English is the main language of instruction and assessment, the Faculty of Arts within the University of Malta developed a course aimed at improving students’ writing skills. Wong, Kwok and Choi (1995) describe how the use of authentic materials at tertiary level can help develop students’ language skills and guide them to apply these skills to situations outside the classroom. Larsen-Freeman (2000) affirms that Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) advocates the use of authentic materials as a means of tackling ‘the typical problem that students cannot transfer what they learn in the classroom to the outside world’ This is because authentic texts most probably consist of the language that students will encounter outside the confines of the classroom and the language that will present them with genuine challenges given that it makes no concessions for non-native speakers
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