The Use of Authentic Texts with Postgraduate Students

Abstract

Current language teaching pedagogy seems to give a lot of weight to the use of authentic materials. This article describes how a group of bilingual postgraduate students were assisted in improving their writing skills in English by means of a pedagogical approach that utilized a wide variety of texts published online. It discusses the methodology used as part of this approach and the outcomes of the action research study it formed part of. Despite its limitations, to a large extent this small-scale study confirms the idea that the use of authentic texts in ELT can prove beneficial, especially if students are empowered to choose the texts they would like to base their learning on.