Authenticity revisited: How real is real?

Task-based approaches to materials design problems are popular at the moment, in business courses as in other courses. A number of recently published courses and probably many more unpublished ones, claim task-basedness or have tasks as the main organising principle.’ What does this mean? Such courses make the claim, explicitly or implicitly, that rehearsal in the classroom of the tasks to be performed in the target language will improve performance in the real world outside. The rationale for these kinds of tasks can be contrasted with the rationale for so-called “pedagogic” tasks which involve students performing some set of exercises from which they can extrapolate appropriate language behaviour (See Nunan, 1989, pp. 5-21). The problem for the teacher or materials writer, in the first case, is in matching what happens in the classroom with what happens in the real world outside the classroom. In the second case it is in delimiting the number and kinds of exercises that are required for the behaviour to be generalisable.’ There is an assumption in “real world’ rationalised task-based courses that the more authentically the classroom mirrors the real world, the more real the rehearsal will be and the better the learning and transfer will be. Hence the courses involve authentic o#Ice situations, authentic recordings of business meetings, authentic dialogues, materials derived from authentic sources, etc. This direct relationship between an organising principle for courses, a particular type of classroom activity (a tusk) and real-worldness provides a powerful tool with which to reexamine the problematic notion of authenticity.