The late 1980s brought to language pedagogy in academia the notion that the
best input was authentic, especially for developing the receptive skills. However,
almost immediately after the appearance of initial teaching materials based
on truly authentic I+1 texts and scripts ( McKenna, Nakhimovsky, and Rugaleva,
1985, Thompson, 1991, Robin, 1991, Lekic, 1991), reliable sources of authentic
material (straightforward, predictable, and clear, especially for listening
comprehension at early levels) began to dry up. After the fall of the Soviet
Union, diction on radio/TV became fast and slurry; more items in the press came
to assume previous background knowledge.
Practice in reading and listening to paragraphed language based entirely on
authentic production became impossible. Instructors who had jumped on the authentic
bandwagon for everything from Novice to Advanced level input would have to rethink
the possibilities presented by semi-authentic material. Semi-authentic refers
to texts/scripts that pass resemble production by natives for natives, but are
in fact intended for foreign-language learners. They include "faked"
advertisements, news briefs, short informational blurbs, and invented e-mail
and voicemail messages.
In this paper, I will lay down some guidelines for the use of semi-authentic
material to serve as a bridge from the most elementary level on up, both in
terms of providing instructional input and proficiency assessment. Discussion
will focus on the lower levels: Novice and Intermediate in the receptive skills
and the potential for input-to-output crossover in speaking. I will address
the trade-off of sacrificing syntactic complexity and embedded background knowledge
requirements of authentic texts (and tempo for scripts) to work on helping students
to cope with noise: imprecision and lack of clarity due to problems
in the medium at hand: native handwriting in the case of written texts, bad
acoustics and background interference in the case of spoken scripts.
References
Lekic, Maria. 1991. Russian Listening Comprehension, Part I. Center
for Slavic & East European Studies, Ohio State University.
McKenna, Kevin J., Alexander Nakhimovsky and Anelya Rugaleva. 1985. Reading
Russian Newspapers. The Center for Slavic & East European Studies,
Ohio State University.
Robin, Richard. 1991. Russian Listening Comprehension, Part II. Center
for Slavic & East European Studies, Ohio State University.
Thompson, Irene. 1991. Reading Real Russian, 1st edition. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.