In a phonology and phonetics, when do you want to use authentic passage to test specific pronunciation of sounds produced by students you will find that the authentic document available does not capture all the items you want to test. In this case will a passage written by the researcher and covering all the items he/she wants to test be a better option?
I am with Ali on this.
With pronunciation, you can also ask students to enunciate individual or pair words. If the focus of your study is on intonation or other suprasegmental features, it might be a better choice to use authentic materials for authentic purposes. When it comes to phonology at sentential or intersentential levels, context is vital to a valid test.
I think it depends a lot on what exactly you want to test. For testing students' fluency in free conversation, of course you need to see how they converse spontaneously. But do assess how good their specific aspect of pronunciation is, especially when you want to make comparison between students, designed materials may give you clearer answers than spontaneous speech. Please see my discussion on a similar issue in more theoretical phonetic research: Xu, Y. (2010). In defense of lab speech. Journal of Phonetics 38: 329-336.
@ Yi Xu,
Thank you very much for your answer and your material. I am studying it and hope it will be useful to me.
Those who are following this thread may find the following Ph.D. thesis interesting and helpful:
C.-J. Ko, Early-stage French as a Foreign Language in Taiwan: a case study involving L2 oral proficiency..., Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2010, 342 pages:
https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/7818/1/Ko2010.pdf
Podcasts provide language teachers and learners with a wide range of possibilities for
listening to authentic conversations inside and outside of the classroom (Stanley, 2006), p. 30.
Texts can be considered authentic that assist learners in discovering the communication
conventions in the target language and allow them to share the interpretation of meaning within the text or any other texts with other fluent users of the language,p. 51. For example, I have been learning Turkish and have found very helpful newspapers (available at Turkish airports) with split columns (English in one column, Turkish in the adjacent column).
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In most cases authentic materials are more effective since it offers things from the students' environment. They don't need to imagine a lot. So the message will be conveyed and communicated swiftly. In fact, this depends on the availability of the authentic material and its cost and its safety.
Another source of authentics materials comes from sitting in a public place in either a restaurant or in a train station or airport and hearing those from other countries speak in a natural way in their native language. For those students who want to learn a language other than their own native language, listening to others speak in their native language is a great source of tuned-in authentic material.
I think the choice of an authentic or inauthentic material depends on the context in which you are. As a teacher, you can make the best decision based on the context.
I think the focus should be on achieving the required results with students. For this, improvisation by the teacher becomes crucial. There is no point in sticking to authentic material when it is not helping the student pronounce correctly. In fact, it would be perhaps non-traditional yet effective to use words from the student's native language to drive home, through comparison, how the pronunciation is to be done in the language being learnt.
Paulo Freire believed a lot in authentic materials and people say that his method performed miracles in completely illiterate people. You may find reading his work interesting.
My intuition and experience drives me to think that fabricated materials would have to be better because you can then target specific points, but, as the fellow said, it all depends on your intentions. If you want to practice reading, for instance, authentic materials are excellent. If you want to test reading, all the same.
If you want to teach a new point, then fabricated.
Please read my paper on a new method of teaching (profile here).
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