The Use of Authentic Text to Teach Writing Skills to Political Science Students

Using authentic materials in teaching ESP is part and parcel of communicative approach methodology. Unadapted materials bring the classroom closer to real-life language use and make language learning more meaningful and engaging for students. Both a challenge and benefit for teachers though is that from a vast array of authentic materials available today, they have to choose the ones which would meet their students’ needs and expectations. Based on an ESP class taught to political science students, this article offers a suggestion on how to approach writing skills (namely, using cohesive devices) by analyzing the construction of an authentic article. As Ukraine is heading towards tighter integration with the European Union, the country’s higher education curriculum is facing new challenges, striving to update its standards and bring them closer to those of European universities. Teaching English to higher education students is also transforming by adopting contemporary communicative approach in the classroom, which involves task-based learning with a lot of pairand groupwork in class, roleplay, case study, projectbased methodology, etc. The same principles are applied to teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes, which make up integral part of English language learning curriculum. This article will discuss the possibilities of using authentic texts in ESP instruction and analyse a case of using an original article written in English in an English class with 3rd year students of philosophy department who read political science as their specialism. It should be mentioned at the start though that there have been different approaches to defining authentic materials. Because authentic language material is usually viewed as “texts produced by native speakers for a non-pedagogical purpose” [1, p. 459] or “as the material which has not been especially designed for language teaching, but produced for purposes other than to teach language” [6, p. 99], this may question the authenticity of any material once it is brought into a language classroom and used for teaching purposes. Quoting Serbian scholar Savka Blagojevic, not to engage deeper into the discussion “whether authentic materials are only those which belong to the real world and are designed to meet its demands, and not the ones used in a classroom, we shall focus on the language teaching material which comprises authentic texts that have not been written to make up a teaching sample which will be the subject of certain language analyses” [2, p. 116]. In other words, for the purposes of this article, we shall consider authentic the materials which have not been adapted or created to teach language systems or skills. The distinctive feature of using authentic materials in class is its emphasis on the interpretation of the language sample, with students being as a rule more interested in the content of the presented text than in the language forms available in it. This refers to the language acquisition theory by Stephen Krashen who stresses the importance of the interest that learners have primarily in the content, rather than the form, of the text, which prevents them from consciously concentrating on language forms and thus ‘acquire’ a foreign language subconsciously [4]. However, there are arguments both for and against the use of such texts. The use of authentic texts in ESP instruction is justified on the assumption that simplified or adapted, unlike the ‘real life’ material, non-authentic texts which are constructed solely for language teaching purposes cannot provide the material fully appropriate for the classroom: simplified texts usually lack their original and subtle meanings and fail to properly prepare language learners to face real-world situations. In other words, according to Long, “texts in language teaching materials bear little resemblance to the genuine target discourse samples learners encounter in the world outside classrooms”, and “every study in which language teaching materials [. ] and genuine texts have been compared has found the former to be unrepresentative in important ways” [5, p. 121]. That is why he sees the use of genuine (authentic) texts as a significant element in teaching ESP. An argument against the use of authentic texts could be that they are written in a language too difficult for language learners to understand. Gilmore emphasises another characteristic of the language complexity of authentic texts used in ESP courses: as authentic texts reflect the real-life language, they contain a great diversity of grammatical and lexical elements, which means that they are much more abundant in language forms than the texts constructed for language teaching purposes [3]. Thus, a necessary prerequisite for using authentic materials in the classroom seems to be the students’ certain level of linguistic competency, as well as the prior knowledge of their subject matter. Meanwhile, some authors, for example Torregrosa Benavent and SánchezReyes Peñamaría [9], suggest that students of any level of linguistic competency can be effectively exposed to authentic texts in their classroom, the main idea being to offer students a great number of short authentic texts instead of longer passages. They believe that the quantity of texts will provide a high enough level of frequency of the language elements aimed to be taught in the classroom and will help students recognise them. This is generally seen as the pre-condition and the first stage in acquiring foreign language elements. Savka Blagojevic remarks that, in order to properly select an authentic text for the ESP classroom, it is necessary, first, to undertake several analyses, namely: “1. The needs analysis of students’ particular academic discipline, which includes students’ both actual and anticipated needs, adjusted to the general and specific objectives of an ESP course; 2. The analysis of students’ prior knowledge of a language; 3. The analysis of students’ prior knowledge of a discipline” [2,p.120]. At Kyiv National University students who do not major in philology learn general English for the first two years of studies, and for another two years of their bachelor’s programme they are taught ESP depending on their specialism. The expectations of Ukrainian philosophy students as for the outcome of their English studies at the university level are quite traditional and not country-specific: generally they wish to be able to integrate into the international community of philosophy scholars, be able to present in English at conferences, effectively interact with their colleagues from around the world, write articles that would be accepted for publishing in international peer-reviewed journals. A case,