Plenary lecture:
‘Authenticity 2.0’
As
language use today moves increasingly into digital fora - social media, social
networking and so on, accompanied by an internationalisation of the language
most associated with the Internet, English, the concept of 'authenticity' in
the context of language samples and language use becomes ever more evasive. One
route for achieving authenticity in the language learning context can be found,
ironically perhaps, in the work of pre-digital theorists such as Van Lier (e.g.
1996), who maintained that authenticity was not intrinsic to learning materials
themselves but was a factor of the learners' engagement with them and of the
tasks enacted with them. This conception of authenticity is a perfect fit for
the digital era, where more and more of the language use is in interaction on a plethora of different
media and applications. In the digital era, therefore it is to interaction and
task that we turn for our 'authenticity 2.0'.