Not for novices, anyway. It’s too hard for them. I’m giving up. They simply cannot navigate them in a meaningful way to provide the comprehensible input necessary for language acquisition, so why even try? I’m buying into what a teacher trainer told me this week: “Authentic language isn’t comprehensible for beginners.”
Take this, for example. What are my kids on the second day of Spanish 1 going to get out of this newspaper announcement on the TYRANNY that is the RAE?
They’ll be totally confused by the culture here. They’ll never understand that 1) there’s an extra letter in the alphabet or 2) there’s a group of people who determine the alphabet in Spanish, which we do not have or 3) the date is written in a different order, and in seeing that date they certainly won’t understand that…
4) April Fool’s is not limited to the U.S.
Authentic or inauthentic, any resource that lights the fire and provides comprehensible input has a place in my classroom. But the authentic ones showcase the culture the best, because no one manufactured them for that purpose. They just do. This picture just sits there and does it for me.
For those of you who agree to never use authentic resources for novices,
https://tackk.com/authenticresources4spanish
https://tackk.com/ebooks4heritage
https://tackk.com/cuentosconpicto
😉
Not very nice for someone who saw this pop up on Twitter when she hadn’t even had her coffee!! 😉
My deepest apologies 😉
It depends on what they have already been exposed to. Novices can learn from authentic resources. We also need to explain to them as we go along. Mine LOVED it when I expanded on Mexican snacks, incorporating menus from our city and comparing them to what I brought back from my travels. I’ve also used articles from blogs I’ve found.