Introduction

It might appear strange to the reader that this section, which would appear to be one of the most important discussions of the book, has been relegated to the fourth chapter. It seems likely that many readers will pick up the book, look at the contents and choose to start at this page. However, the previous sections are important precursors to this chapter, as they greatly undermine many of the established notions of authenticity as it relates to second language instruction. Although I have tried to make each chapter of this volume able to stand alone as a self-contained unit, I would still advise that readers be familiar with the concepts that I established in the previous chapters; namely that authenticity is a term with philosophical implications, deeply related to Self, identity and an individuals' position in society; and that the society in which learners of the English language will find themselves is no longer recognisably the product or possession of countries where English is the first language. Rather, English now belongs to a global movement of people who wish to communicate across cultures and borders. In the previous sections I argued that chaos/complexity theory is perhaps one of the best ways of making sense (or at least attempting to conceptualise the complexities) of the process of learning a foreign language, as well as the multiple and interdisciplinary strands that contribute to the study of second language acquisition. In the light of these developments in SLA, I feel authenticity is in need of an updated examination.

The use of authentic materials has for almost a hundred years been a relatively common place occurrence in the language classroom (Gilmore, 2007a: 98), although Mishan (2005) states that using authentic materials for language instruction is as old as the learning of other languages itself. Authenticity is used often in and around the language classroom, and it can describe either the learning materials used for input, the tasks employed by the teacher or the actual language produced by a speaker.