Adult language learners have specific learning goals that reflect their lives within a global society, and adults negotiate multiple and changing identities throughout their personal, academic, and professional lives. Chapters in Authenticity in the Language Classroom and Beyond: Adult Learners highlight how teachers have the ability to transform language instruction from a mechanical learning experience to a dynamic interaction to assist learners in reaching real-world goals. Rather than focus only on native-speaker norms of language production, English language instruction can provide adult learners with opportunities to create and act on their own texts, engage meaningfully with audiences, and develop interactions that mirror their purpose for learning. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how language teaching practices engage learners' inauthentic experiences, using and producing texts to meet international and localized communication needs. All the chapters in this volume demonstrate that authenticity is more than just the materials we use. Authenticity also means using language for real purposes. It means engaging students in collaborative learning, involving discussions, negotiations, and decision making. Authenticity is creating real uses for English, not just modeling native-speaker language and culture. With English increasingly being used as a lingua franca to connect second language speakers, authenticity takes on new meanings as we seek to develop learners who can face the challenge of communicating effectively in an increasingly globalized world.

This book explores authenticity as it relates to second language acquisition with a focus on the instruction of English as a foreign language. It discusses the theoretical issues surrounding authenticity and presents it as a complex dynamic construct that can only be understood by examining it from social, individual and contextual dimensions.

Using film and video in the classroom is motivating and fun but can be daunting for the teacher. This book guides and supports teachers with plenty of practical suggestions for activities which can be used with drama, soap opera, comedy, sports programmes and documentaries. Many of the activities will lend themselves for use with DVD and webcasts.

Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.

This volume makes a unique contribution to the literature on materials development for language learning. It focuses on issues related to authenticity in materials development and includes research-based position statements, applications of theory to practice and developments of theory from observed practice. Each paper concentrates on a different aspect of authenticity and many of them introduce the reader to previously unexplored facets of authenticity. The chapters are sequenced so that the book moves from general discussion about the value of authenticity to reports of evaluations of authenticity to reports of the exploitation of authenticity in specific learning contexts. Many questions are raised, much revealing data is reported and analysed, and many pedagogic suggestions are made. The contributions here have been written so that they are of potential value to teachers, to materials developers, to post-graduate students and to researchers. They are written to be academically rigorous, but at the same time to be accessible to newcomers to the field and to experienced experts alike.

Authenticity is one of the most rampant buzzwords in ELT (English Language Teaching). Many have weighed in on what authenticity should mean and on how it may be achieved. The book at hand is an extensive analysis of authenticity as a term and as a concept within the academic field of ELT. The research data comprises virtually all definitions and conceptualizations of authenticity in the international ELT literature. However, only a limited number of texts contributes to what can be called an explicit negotiation of authenticity. A discourse analytical approach is taken to disentangle the hubbub of commentaries and to eventually extrapolate from it six distinct concepts which are attached to the term 'authenticity'. Michel Foucault's seminal theories are invoked, affording additional insights into discourse dynamics and power structures among individuals and institutions in ELT.

Learn how to implement a real-world approach to project-based learning. Authentic learning experiences are created around genuine, outside audiences and meaningful purposes. They meet the Common Core, engage students in critical thinking and 21st Century learning, teach important skills such as research and collaboration, and improve student learning. This practical guide provides step-by-step instructions to make it easy for teachers to create their own authentic learning experiences. The book is loaded with a variety of examples from different grade levels and content areas. Bonus! Each example incorporates technology and addresses the Common Core State Standards.

"This book is made up of a collection of peer-reviewed chapters that reflect the construct of authentic learning--learning that is centred on rich, real-world, immersive and engaging tasks"--Provided by publisher.

Linguistic landscapes can play an important role in educating individuals beyond formal pedagogical environments. This book argues that anywhere can be a space for people to learn from displayed texts, images, and other communicated signs, and consequently a space where teachable cultural moments are created. Following language learning trajectories that 'exit through the language classroom' into city streets, public offices, museums and monuments, this volume presents innovative work demonstrating that anyone can learn from the linguistic landscape that surrounds them. Offering a bridge between theoretical research and practical application, chapters consider how we make sense of places by understanding how the landscape is used to express, claim and contest identities and ideologies. In this way, Linguistic Landscapes Beyond the Language Classroom highlights the unexpected potential of the informal settings for learning and for teachers to expand their students' intercultural experience.

This book examines the concept of authentic English in today’s world, where cultures are in constant interaction and the English language works as a binding agent for many cross-cultural exchanges. It offers a comprehensive review of decades of debate around authenticity in language teaching and learning and attempts to synthesise the complexities by presenting them as a continuum. This continuum builds on the work of eminent scholars and combines them within a flexible framework that celebrates the process of interaction whilst acknowledging the complexity and individual subjectivity of authenticity. Authenticity is approached as a complex dynamic construct that can only be understood by examining it from social, individual and contextual dimensions, in relation to actual people. Authenticity is a problem not just for language acquisition but one which affects us as individuals belonging to society.