Hello Paul

This brings back memories!

This is also how I remember being instructed to give instructions. It's quite incredible really - a novice teacher could be forgiven for thinking that in the classroom, 100% of the people are paying 100% attention 100% of the time. Any failure to receive instructions *must* be a fault on the teacher's part! A novice teacher could also be forgiven for thinking that clear instructions will never be misinterpreted - not the case, of course.

When you see instruction-giving as authentic interaction as you point out, instruction-giving strategies completely change. I always assume that a certain number of students won't hear my instructions. As long as most students seem to be getting on with what they understand is the task in hand, the teacher can then go around the class and do the fine tuning.

I have also been a big fan of activities in which the instructions can be a part of the input language. I wrote a post on this a while back: http://www.jamiekeddie.com/184

Interesting points.

It does lead to a wider question of when you can introduce significant amounts of authentic language to the classroom.

Obviously authentic language is on the whole (unless it's functional I suppose) ungraded meaning that lower levels might find it very difficult to understand anything. this might render a lesson almost useless.

There seems to be a growing fad for authenticity in the classroom but how do we actually manage its use? Any thoughts on when authentic language is appropriate?

Hello Paul and fvilliers-stuart

A while back, Steve Oakes started at thread on authentic materials (including imported texts):

http://www.eltcommunity.com/elt/message/2575#2575

Here, as I understand it, authenticity refers to the tasks, activities or communication that we do in the classroom.

I think that it is much more difficult to define this second type of authenticity. For example, imagine a game or task that involves students telling each other what they have in their bags. This could seem to be as inauthentic as things get until you find that there is a whole culture of this on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/whats_in_your_bag/

In fact, after responding to Paula's comment, I starting to wonder if the ideas of authenticity and efficacy are in fact mutually incompatible. And good writer will aim for efficacy - communicating ideas or images on the mind of the reader as effectively as possible. There is nothing inauthentic about that.

Bu, one thing of which I am sure:

Asking questions is to be encouraged. Students who ask questions are students that want to understand. Telling trainees that questions are symptomatic of bad instructions is absurd and almost attempting to obstruct natural communication which is what Paul's question was all about.

Thanks for the food for thought!

Hi Paul,

This thread got me thinking about authentic instruction giving in 'real' life and actually how poor a lot of people are in giving instructions anyway. For instance, my friend giving me instructions about how to use a new version of Word - too much information all at once and losing me with terminology, and giving me no chance to 'have a go' until too late, by which time I'd forgotten most of what he'd said.  In this case I was able to  slow him down and stop him but that's not something you can do in all situations, particularly with 'authority' figures. The thing is that this overload can and has sometimes prevented me 'getting' something and I haven't felt confident enough to stop the speaker/instructor, but it's also often caused me to check with someone nearby. So there's a possibility of encouraging an authentic exchange with another student (What did she say? What does she want us to do? What do we have to do?), which is something worth encouraging in class.

However, (and here with a trainer's hat on) I do think a trained teacher ought to be able to monitor her/his use of language. The issue for new teachers is often that they haveno awareness of what they're saying or ability to adjust it either to give unambiguous instructions or to go for more complex ones (e.g. the v. common: 'What I want you to do now is I want you to.... ') They also often haven't thought through the stages needed for an activity to work and so slowing down and thinking through the steps and the instructions needed for these steps seems to serve as a good training tool.  I agree totally with Jamie, though, that there'll always be people who weren't listening/weren't concentrating/didn't hear etc. and I'd always expect to have to whizz round and check everyone's 'on-task' after the activity's started (or, as above, and better probably, get them to check with another student).

Frances