Developing a set of criteria to evaluate the authenticity of EAP materials

With these criteria, I was trying to capture what makes teaching materials authentic. So, the section on language input draws on the idea that input should be meaningful, whether this might mean topics likely to interest students and/or genres and modes relevant to their needs (Hedge, 2000). I also included source and length because I thought this type of data could yield some interesting information in relation to the perhaps narrowest conceptualisation of authenticity as the ‘use of texts not intentionally created for language teaching purposes’. The task section in my set of criteria is an attempt to go beyond the narrow definition of authenticity and investigate the broader conceptualisation of authenticity I mentioned earlier in this blog post.

I believe that using these criteria to reflect on the materials I design proved useful in identifying how I could make them more authentic. For a start, the data analysis revealed that the majority of the language input in my materials was sourced from assignments written by previous students. The quality of these samples varied from high-scoring samples to less successful ones. I didn’t make any changes to the original student samples (in this sense, they were indeed authentic). This is a fairly popular approach in EAP, mainly for two reasons. Firstly, authentic texts such as research articles tend to be perceived as too long and difficult for EAP learners, especially pre-undergraduates. Secondly, they encourage students to be teachers, so to speak. For example, when looking at student exemplars in class, learners are encouraged to identify both strengths and areas for development, which involves using their judgement. When the EAP tutor analyses these samples with the learners, what the tutor is doing is essentially demystifying what good academic writing is or, using Smyth & Carless’s (2021) words, they make what would otherwise remain ‘tacit knowledge’ visible to students. The ability to judge a draft is invaluable for university students, who often do not get feedback on their drafts.  

This approach, however, has recently come under criticism. The use of student exemplars seems to exacerbate the mismatch between the texts students read and have access to and what they are asked to produce: the so-called ‘genre paradox’ (Walková, 2023). Students usually have access to published papers written by expert writers, and these are what they read for their assignments. Students do not have access to a sufficiently large bank of student samples, and this prevents the development of formal schemata for which frequent exposure is necessary. An additional issue is that students are often not encouraged to engage with the content of student exemplars. This issue also transpired in my study: even when the topics of the exemplars in my materials were authentic in the sense that they were potentially interesting or relevant to students (e.g., night safety in Bristol, transitioning to university, gender and students’ choices in my study), the activities in the worksheets did not ask students to share a personal response or engage with the content. Table 2 provides a sample of the questions used in some of these activities. As you can see, the focus is on reading strategies and textual features of the text. The fact that these materials do not encourage a personal response in learners might impact the extent to which they perceive the content of the lesson as interesting and informative (McGrath, 2002).