IT has long been the practice for graded texts in course books to contain numerous examples of the same grammatical structure in order to highlight the use of that structure in context. Unless the text is skillfully written, Tim Bowen believes this will often have the effect of making the style of the text rather stilted and unrealistic. Bowen is a teacher and teacher trainer at Embassy CES Language and training centre in the UK.
In the case of authentic reading texts, however, it is rarely the case that a particular text will have numerous examples of the same grammatical structure. If a teacher intends to make use of an authentic text to highlight a particular grammatical structure or structures, his or her task therefore becomes a little trickier.
The teacher will have to identify a structure that is both useful and challenging for the class he or she is teaching and then decide how best to exploit that particular structure for further work. It is highly likely that the teacher will have to go beyond the actual text and produce an exercise related to the examples in the text in order to give substantial practice of the chosen structure.
At the basic observational level, when using an authentic task to illustrate a grammar point, the teacher might ask the students to find an example or examples of a particular structure in the text. For example: find an example of a passive sentence in paragraph 1; underline all the passive sentences in the text; find different tenses expressed in the passive voice in the text; find a passive sentence in the present continuous tense.
When looking at the meaning and use in more depth, the teacher might ask questions like these: Why does the author use the passive voice here? Could the author use the active voice? If so, what would the sentence be like?
In order to give further practice of the particular structure the teacher has chosen to focus on, it will almost certainly be necessary to prepare some kind of exercise based on the structure (perhaps using the same context as the text).
The advantage of focusing on structures in an authentic text such as a newspaper article is that it enables the students to see these structures functioning in an authentic context.
