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 INGLÉS 19
s t r a de ICS Linguistics
Mue INGUIST
i o d eL
ic
ejerc
Grammar

3 AUTHENTICITY AND AUTONOMY IN ELT

Henry G Widdowson

There are two ideas that have been promoted in

English language teaching over recent years. (1) One
is that the language to be presented in the classroom
should be as authentic as possible so as to represent
the reality of native speaker use. (2) The other is that
learners should be as autonomous as possible, and be
allowed to make the language their own. (3) The question I should like to raise is
whether these two ideas are complementary or contradictory. (4)
The authenticity idea develops from a communicative orientation to language
teaching. (5) The argument runs along the following lines. (6) If you are going to
teach real English as it functions in contextually appropriate ways, rather than a
collection of linguistic forms in artificial classroom situations, then you need to refer
to how native speakers actually put it to communicative use. (7) Authenticity is thus
dependent on the authority of the native speaker. (8) The idea gains support, too,
from the vast accumulation and analysis of language which can now be carried out
by computer. (9) Corpus descriptions of English can now make available facts about
authentic usage which we ignored. (10) It is an idea, therefore, which is not only
appealing in principle, but feasible in practice. (11) The appropriate English for the
classroom is the real English that is appropriately used outside it. (12) We now know
what real English looks like, so we no longer have an excuse for not teaching it. (13)
The authenticity idea gives primacy to the goal of learning. (14) If real
communicative behaviour is what learners have eventually to learn, then that is
what they have to be taught. (15) The autonomy idea gives primacy to the process
of learning. (16) The argument here is that if this is to be activated effectively,
then we need to appeal to the learners’ own experience, and get them engaged
on their own terms. (17) They need to be induced to invest the language with their
own personalities and goals, to interact with each other on problem-solving tasks
which will give a purpose to their learning. (18) The emphasis here is not on the
language that will be appropriate in contexts of use, but on the language that can
be appropriated in contexts of learning. (19)
The difficulty is that, on the face of it, the two ideas appear to be incompatible.
(20) They give priority to contrary realities. (21) Authenticity concerns the reality
of the communication in English which is realized by an English-speaking
community. (22) But the language which is real for native speakers is not likely to
be real for learners. (23) One might argue that logically it cannot be, for learners
have by definition not yet learned how to make it so. (24) They belong to another
community and do not have the necessary knowledge of the contextual conditions
which would enable them to verify their proficiency in English in native-speaker
terms. (25) Their reality is quite different: it is one which relates to a different
community served by a language other than English. (26) So contexts which
will be meaningful for them have somehow to be constructed in the classroom
20 INGLÉS
ENUNCIADOS

out of this primary experience of first language and culture. (27) They cannot be
replicated versions of native-speaker contexts of use. (28) Teachers who come from
the same community as their learners, of course, have this experience in common.
(29) They are therefore naturally in a better position to construct the relevant
classroom contexts and make the learning process real than are teachers coming
from a different linguistic and cultural background. (30) In this sense, autonomy is
dependent on non-native-speaker authority. (31)
It would seem, then, that you cannot have a pedagogy which is based on both of
these ideas at the same time. (32) Authentic language is, in principle, incompatible
with autonomous language learning. (33) Or is it? (34) Are there ways, in practice, of
reconciling these contraries? (35)
[From H. G. Widdowson: "Comment: authenticity and autonomy in ELT",
ELT Journal 50 (1996)]

Questions
1. Pick out all the adjectives from the fourth paragraph. Identify adjectival
suffixes and prefixes and indicate the suffixation process (e.g., denominal,
deverbal, etc.). Classify them into predicative (complement in copulative and
complex-transitive constructions) and/or attributive (pre-head modifier in
noun phrases).
2. Adjectives and participles. Which of the following words are verbs (participle
forms) and which are adjectives (deverbal adjectives), and which are
ambiguous between the two? Consider their use in the text and other possible
contexts: promoted, allowed, activated, engaged, induced, constructed, replicated.
3. Adverbialisation. Identify the adverbs in the second paragraph.
Replace those formed by suffixation of -ly by prepositional phrases
(e.g., carefully → with care), and, where possible, those without this suffix by
-ly adverbs (e.g., now → currently).
4. Identify the function of the adverbs in the second paragraph:
(i) adjunct (She sang beautifully); (ii) modifier in adjective phrase (The film is
extremely boring); disjunct (Obviously, they were all arrested); subjunct (She
was only joking); conjunct (Moreover, costs are high).
5. Analyse sentence (23).
6. Authenticity in materials is essentially about the conditions in which they
are produced (usually by native speakers for language teaching purposes)
but authenticity can also be about the conditions in which they are used.
Activities focused on class performance can provide meaningful experiences
which take place in "authentic" conditions. Prepare a fifteen-minute class
activity asking your students to note down what was said or done to
achieve a particular interactional aim (e.g., giving opinions, expressing
disagreement). USE AUTHENTIC, MOTIVATING AND UPDATED MATERIAL.
7. "Speech acts" and "cohesion and coherence", comment the text from the
point of view of these theories.
 INGLÉS 69
s t r a de LYSIS Text Analysis and Didactics
Mue XT ANA
d e TE TICS
rc i c i o D AC
eje AND DI Argumentative Text: Personal essay

34 NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK

Anne Fadiman
(1998)

Read the text and answer the questions below:

When I was eleven and my brother was thirteen, our parents took us to Europe. At
the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen, as he had done virtually every night of his
literate life, Kim left a book facedown on the bedside table. The next afternoon, he
returned to find the book closed, a piece of paper inserted to mark the page, and the
following note, signed by the chambermaid, resting on its cover:
SIR, YOU MUST NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK.
My brother was stunned. How could it have come to pass that he –a reader
so devoted that he´d sneaked a book and a flashlight under the covers at this
boarding school every night after lights-out, a crime punishable by a swat with a
wooden paddle– had been branded as someone who didn’t love books? I shared his
mortification. I could not imagine a more bibliolatrous family than the Fadimans.
Yet, with the exception of my mother, in the eyes of the young Danish maid we
would all have been found guilty of rampant book abuse.
During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way
to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book. The chambermaid
believed in courtly love. A book’s physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form
inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble
but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had
left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book’s words
were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained
them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire
and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.
Hillarie Belloc, a courtly lover, once wrote:
Child! do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.
What would Belloc have thought of my father, who, in order to reduce the weight
of the paperbacks he read on airplanes, tore off the chapters he had completed and
threw them in the trash? What would he have thought of my husband, who reads
in the sauna, where heat-fissioned pages drop like petals in a storm? What would
he have thought (here I am making a brazen attempt to upgrade my family by
association) of Thomas Jefferson, who chopped up a priceless 1572 first edition of
Plutarch’s works in Greek in order to interleave its pages with an English translation?
Or of my old editor Byron Dobell, who, when he was researching an article on the
Grand Tour, once stayed up all night reading six volumes of Boswell’s journals and,
as he puts it, "sucked them like a giant mongoose"? Byron told me, "I didn’t give
a damn about the condition of those volumes. In order to get where I had to go,
70 INGLÉS
ENUNCIADOS

I underlined them, wrote in them, shredded them, dropped them, tore them into
pieces, and did things to them that we can’t discuss in public."
Byron loves books. Really, he does. So does my husband, an incorrigible book-
splayer whose roommate once informed him. "George, if you ever break the spine of
one of my books, I want you to know you might as well be breaking my own spine."
So does Kim, who reports that despite his experience in Copenhagen, his bedside
table currently supports three spreadeagled volumes. "They are ready in an instant
to let me pick them up," he explains. "To use an electronics analogy, closing a book
on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book
facedown, you’ve only pressed Pause." I confess to marking my place promiscuously,
sometimes splaying, sometimes committing the even more grievous sin of dog-
earing the page. (Here I manage to be simultaneously abusive and compulsive:
I turn down the upper corner for page-marking and the lower corner to identify
passages I want to xerox for my commonplace book.)
All courtly lovers press Stop. My Aunt Carol –who will probably claim she is no
relation once she finds out how I treat my books– places reproductions of Audubon
paintings horizontally to mark the exact paragraph where she left off. If the colored
side is up, she was reading the lefthand page; if it’s down, the righthand page. A
college classmate of mine, a lawyer, uses his business cards, spurning his wife’s
silver Tiffany bookmarks because they are a few microns too thick and might leave
vestigial stigmata. Another classmate, an art historian, favors Paris Métro tickets or
"those inkjet-printed credit cards receipts –but only in books of art criticism whose
pretentiousness I wish to desecrate with something really crass and financial. I
would never use those in fiction or poetry, which really are sacred."
Courtly lovers always remove their bookmarks when the assignation is over; carnal
lovers are likely to leave romantic mementos, often three-dimensional and messy.
Birds of Yosemite and the East Slope, a volume belonging to a science writer friend,
harbors an owl feather and the tip of a squirrel’s tail, evidence of a crime scene near
Tioga Pass. A book critic I know took The Collected Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan
Poe on a backpacking trip through the Yucatán, and whenever an interesting bug
landed in it, she clapped the covers shut. She amassed such a bulging insectarium
that she feared Poe might not make it through customs. (He did.)
From: Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common reader (1998)

Questions
1. Text type, genre and functions of language.
2. Find examples of compound words, derivational affixes, irregular plurals and
borrowings.
3. Find anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric references.
4. British and American spelling variants in the text.
5. Explain the final sentence.
6. Explain the meaning of these words according to the text: rampant, wantonly,
shredded, dog-earing the page.
 s t r a de
Mue SKILLS
INGLÉS 93

ING
Language Skills

WRIT

Example of a balanced essay

LOW-COST AIRLINES HAVE REVOLUTIONIZED TRAVEL. BUT AT WHAT PRICE?

A low-cost company is an airline company which usually offers low prices in exchange for
eliminating many services to the passengers.
The concept arose in USA although it was spreading in Europe at the beginning of the 90s.
The greatest benefit of flying with a low cost company is that it allows us to fly in a very cheap
way.
In addition, with a low-cost company middle-men disappear. With a low cost you can book
and pay your tickets in the company web page, so the middle-people, as a travel agency,
aren’t necessary.
Finally, low-cost airlines have opened new connection points among the most important
European cities, even Spanish cities.
On the other hand, low-cost airlines have got restrictive rules on hand luggage because they
only let you take 10Kg within a special sized travelling bag.
One downside is that if you travel with low-cost airlines the airport will be far from the capital
city where you travel and the transport from the airport to the city will be more expensive
than the plane ticket.
Other drawbacks to travel with low-cost companies are that you must check in on line and you
must print your boarding pass and if you forget it at home you have to pay an unfair price. 
All in all I don’t like travelling with a low-cost airline although I have never been in any trouble
with them. In balance nowadays, in many cases, the important thing is to fly and low-cost
airlines make it easy for us.
 INGLÉS 91
Language Skills

s t r a de
Mue SKILLS
ING
WRIT Writing Skills

WRITING SKILLS: AN ESSAY

Essays are scholarly pieces of writing giving the author’s own argument. Due
to their characteristics, essays sometimes overlap with those of an article,
a pamphlet or even a short story. They include literary criticism, political
manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections and
reflections of an author.
There are some questions to think about before beginning to write any text:
1. Why I am writing?
2. Who am I writing to?
3. What is the best style to write in?
4. What points should I include?
5. How should the piece of writing be organized?
6. How will the target reader feel after reading it?
In order to get our aims, we should follow certain steps, being aware of the
main features that describe the given written text. We recommend:
1. Draft your text, in this case, essay
One option to write an essay is to divide the text into the following points:
1. Introduction: a brief introduction.
2. Arguments in favour.
3. Arguments against.
4. Conclusion.
2. Edit the text, cutting any irrelevant information and making sure it is the
right length.
104 INGLÉS
ENUNCIADOS
s t r a de
Mue NING
LISTE
Listening

19 PRIMARY ELECTIONS EXPLAINED

Listen to the recording and answer the questions below:

1. Give a definition of primary elections in the USA.

2. Differences between primaries and caucuses.

3. What is closed primary?

4. What is a semi-closed election?

5. Which state votes the first?

6. Differences between Iowa and New Hampshire.

7. What is a Super-Tuesday?

8. What is the national convention?

9. How can you define a superdelegate?

10. Write a summary of the primaries in the US.

 INGLÉS 11
s t r a de IONS Translations
Mue ANSLAT
TR
icio de
ejerc Translation and teaching strategies

3 THE LORD OF THE RINGS

J. R. R. Tolkien

Book I. "Fog in the Barrow-Downs"

Their way wound along the floor of the hollow,
and round the green feet of a steep hill into
another deeper and broader valley, and then
over the shoulder of further hills, and down
their long limbs, and up their smooth sides
again, up on to new hill-tops and down into
new valleys. There was no tree nor any visible
water: it was a country of grass and short
springy turf, silent except for the whisper of
the air over the edges of the land, and high
lonely cries of strange birds. As they journeyed
the sun mounted, and grew hot. Each time they
climbed a ridge the breeze seemed to have
grown less. When they caught a glimpse of the country westward the distant
Forest seemed to be smoking, as if the fallen rain was steaming up again from
leaf and root and mould. A shadow now lay round the edge of sight, a dark
haze above which the upper sky was like a blue cap, hot and heavy.
About mid-day they came to a hill whose top was wide and flattened, like a
shallow saucer with a green mounded rim. Inside there was no air stirring, and
the sky seemed near their heads. They rode across and looked northwards.
Then their hearts rose, for it seemed plain that they had come further already
than they had expected. Certainly the distances had now all become hazy and
deceptive, but there could be no doubt that the Downs were coming to an end.
A long valley lay below them winding away northwards, until it came to an
opening between two steep shoulders. Beyond, there seemed to be no more
hills. Due north they faintly glimpsed a long dark line.
That is a line of trees,’ said Merry, ‘and that must mark the Road. All along it for
many leagues east of the Bridge there are trees growing. Some say they were
planted in the old days.’
‘Splendid!’ said Frodo. ‘If we make as good going this afternoon as we have
done this morning, we shall have left the Downs before the Sun sets and be
jogging on in search of a camping place.’
But even as he spoke he turned his glance eastwards, and he saw that on that
side the hills were higher and looked down upon them; and all those hills were
crowned with green mounds, and on some were standing stones, pointing
upwards like jagged teeth out of green gums.
 successfully conduct its plot was to draw a map of the fictional setting in which
it takes place: Middle-earth. Such an effort is clearly seen in the above passage,
which is written in the third person as many other fiction narratives are. A
translation should try to make it easier for the reader to follow the characters
on their way east from the Old Forest while attempting, at the same time, to
maintain the style of the original.

Questions
1. Read the excerpt carefully trying to picture the scene. One of the purposes
of this excerpt is to make it easy for the reader to locate the characters
geographically. But this passage also introduces some elements of suspense.
Could you point them out?
2. In what way does the long underlined sentence relate to what it describes?
3. Mark the following translations 1, 2, 3, in order of your preference in the
context. Mark X beside any you consider unacceptable. Give a better version
if you can think of one:
a) When they caught a glimpse of the country westward
Cuando echaron un vistazo hacia el oeste
Cuando vislumbraron las regiones orientales
Cuando cogieron un atisbo de la región hacia el oeste
b) the distant Forest seemed to be smoking
el Bosque distante parecía estar humeando
 el Bosque parecía estar humeando en lontananza
el Bosque, distante, parecía estar fumando/ahumado
c) Inside there was no air stirring
Dentro no había aire agitándose
En el interior el aire brillaba por su ausencia
Dentro no corría el aire
d) pointing upwards like jagged teeth
apuntando hacia arriba como dientes mellados
apuntando hacia arriba como colmillos
apuntando hacia arriba como los dientes de una sierra
e) But even as he spoke he turned his glance eastwards
Pero aun mientras hablaba se volvió para mirar al este
Pero aun mientras hablaba echó una ojeada hacia el este
Pero aun mientras hablaba giró su vista al este