On authenticity

If someone had asked me last week what “authenticity” means, or what defines “authentic” language in an EFL classroom, my answer would have included the words real-world, culturally appropriate, natural, and used for communication.

This week’s readings made me think more deeply about the definition of authenticity and its relationship to CALL. I don't think my working definition has changed much, but it certainly has expanded to include more aspects, and I no longer conceive of authenticity as an all-or-nothing category! 

We read

Chapelle, C. A., & Liu, H. (2007). Theory and research: Investigating authenticity. In Egbert, J., & Hanson-Smith, E. (Eds.).CALL environments: Research, practice, and critical issues, 2nd edition (pp. 111-130). Alexandria, VA: TESOL Publications.

and

Johnston, B. (2007). Theory and research: Audience, language use, and language learning. In Egbert, J., & Hanson-Smith, E. (Eds.). CALL environments: Research, practice, and critical issues, 2nd edition (pp. 61-69). Alexandria, VA: TESOL Publications.

Johnston focuses on the notion of audience and its role in authenticity. He defines an authentic audience as “an audience that is concerned exclusively with the meaning of the speaker’s message” (p. 67); thus, he suggests a teacher, in paying attention to form in addition to meaning, is unlikely to be an authentic audience. The potential size of authentic audiences has grown exponentially with the proliferation of computers, as electronic communication (email, blogs, etc.) has opened the gates to a vast sea of new audiences. ELLs might be “disadvantaged both in their understanding of audience-related issues and in their productive capacity for audience design in target language contexts” (p. 69), since online communication tends to be very strongly language based; however, they also have an unprecedented ability to become an authentic audience, themselves.

Chapelle & Liu, meanwhile, take a slightly different, but complementary, approach. First, they follow Widdowson (1979) in terming real-life texts genuine instead of authentic. To Chapelle and Liu, authenticity refers to what learners do with the text; authenticity is derived from “learners’ engagement of strategies for making sense of language in context” (p. 112). They measure authenticity of performance based on “the authenticity of the language elicited” (p. 113), while task authenticity is measured by “estimating correspondences between a pedagogical task and tasks in the domain of interest” (p. 114). 

I like these definitions of authenticity; they’re a great way to think about the activities learners are doing and why they’re doing them. Johnston’s definition of authentic audiences is a great reminder that students need to create for a purpose—indeed, purpose is one of the keys to motivation (e.g., Pink, 2009). CALL makes it easy to garner an authentic audience, even if it’s only one’s classmates: blogs, class web pages, social media, etc., facilitate the “publication” of one’s work. Best of all, most platforms today allow creators to decide how public their creation is. They can share it with the whole world, with a particular class, or with just a select few. In some cases (e.g., YouTube), they can also decide how much interaction they welcome; comments can be disabled or screened.

The Chapelle & Liu paper, meanwhile, was a useful reminder that CALL activities aren’t automatically “authentic,” but instead become authentic when they provide a context and motivation for communication—when learners “simulate talk that works toward objectives used in the real world” (Chapelle & Liu, 2007, p. 112). Tech-based group projects, for example, would evoke the kind of discussion a project team would use in real life, even if the resultant project, itself, involves forced/artificial language production (e.g., writing a story using a particular verb tense). 

Ironically, the CALL example Chapelle & Liu discuss, which involves conversations between two different participants and a computer, completely fails Johnston’s “authentic audience” test, and it has some notable departures from real-life application and language use; however, I appreciated their conclusion that this simulated conversation had "some characteristics at both ends of the authenticity continuum” (p. 124). It was an effective reminder, I think, that we shouldn’t be overly glib with our pronouncements on authenticity or overly confident that all CALL is automatically authentic. In fact, a new spin on this computerized conversation has emerged in recent years with the creation of interactive (“genuine”) videos such as The Subservient Chicken and NSFW: A Hunter Shoots a Bear. Both of these defy polarizing definitions of “authentic” and remind us that the degree of authenticity of CALL depends on a variety of factors, including the ways learners interact with it—and with each other.