In response to a question about advice for teachers who are selecting and deploying materials in a content-based language course, the guest speaker endorsed the practice of tampering with authentic texts. According to my notes, he said “almost all texts should be doctored.”  Here’s the example that I found most interesting (and horrifying): history texts in French tend to use the historic present, thus depriving students of input in terms of the past tense (which is particularly tricky in French because it’s actually an auxiliary (either etre or avoir – the verbs “to be” and “to have”) plus a participle).  The counterbalancing move (language considerations versus content) is for teachers to adapt those texts, larding them with additional verbs, all in the past tense.

It will be in the last month of the semester when we discuss this in detail. My basic position will be this:  firstly, any time we change or adapt or doctor an authentic text, we run the risk of changing the discourse and actually making it harder for L2 students to understand.  Secondly, it is our responsibility to present to students the target language as it is currently spoken or written.  Therefore, with respect to our guest, if contemporary history texts are largely written in the historic present, then that’s how they will be presented in our content-based class.  It is not, for me, compatible with a content-based approach to have a grammatical agenda.  In the same way, teachers’ classroom speech should be natural, not scripted (warped, contaminated) with attempts to include multiple examples of a particular grammatical structure.

The series of guest speakers is named for my late friend and colleague Leo van Lier. In the mid-1990s, Leo published a book with became know as “the three A’s” – which are in the subtitle, Awareness, Autonomy and Authenticity. This presentation had some promising ideas about Awareness; however, language educators also need to enforce principles of Authenticity(authentic materials, authentic tasks and so on) and Autonomy.  That balancing act is what makes curriculum design a Wicked Problem.