Designing Authentic Activities for a University Course: An Eclectic Approach

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Conferencia; 42nd FAAPI Annual Conference. Revitalising ELT through Authenticity: Practices, Contents and Materials; 2017

Asociación de Profesores de Inglés de Misiones

The design of authentic activities is a central element of most current approaches to language teaching. This paper aims at showing how we have designed authentic activities for English Language I students at the School of Languages, UNC following an eclectic approach. English Language I is a first-year subject of the English Language Teaching, Translation and Licentiate programmes. Its goal is to help students reach an intermediate level of English using current methods and approaches. As Nunan (1989) maintains, there is a symbioticrelationship between the approaches to teaching and the materials chosen to apply them. Consequently, we have designed materials following the main tenets of the approaches and methods adopted using authentic texts (Gilmore, 2007). Since the use of authentic texts in non-authentic ways ?limits the potential of the materials as resources of language learning? (Gannio, Labate & Lineares, 2016, p.84), this eclectic approach has guided the design of authentic language activities. The criteria for the selection of authentic texts to cater for students' needs will be specified and examples will be provided.