AUTHENTIC TEXTS AND TEXT COMPLEXITY “Read often. Mostly silent. Focus on knowledge.” —Dr. Elfrieda (Freddy) Hiebert, president and CEO of TextProject
KEY FINDINGS
> > Children deserve access to authentic texts—children’s literature or classroom magazines that are written for a real purpose: to entertain, to inform, to instruct, to persuade, etc. These are texts that invite active reading, robust problem- solving, and deep analysis because they comprise compelling ideas and living language—a fact well understood and promoted by cognitive psychologists and education researchers for decades (Bridges, 2018). > > Al Azri and Al-Rashdi (2014) call authentic texts “vital” to language learning. Nuttall (1996) agrees: “Authentic texts are motivating, because they are a proof that the language is used for real-life purposes by real people.” > > Early literacy expert Lesley Morrow, who defines authentic texts as, “A stretch of real language produced by a real speaker or writer for a real audience and designed to convey a real message of some sort” (1977), also notes their indispensable role in the early childhood classroom. > > Additionally, when it comes to supporting the needs of emerging bilinguals, authentic texts are also much preferred. “Teachers of English are advised to provide their students with different sources of authentic materials to increase their interest and motivation because authentic materials are closer to students’ real life than non-authentic materials” (Baniabdelrahman, 2006). > > Authentic texts are never contrived; in other words, they aren’t texts that are written or assembled for the sole purpose of teaching reading or delivering a set of skills. They’re texts crafted by a real author, typically a skilled writer, who uses language in which all four language systems are in place—graphophonemic, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic—to craft a story or develop an informational text.
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CHAPTER 4: TEXT
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