Using authentic material to teach EFL in the eighth level of basic education at Simón Bolívar junior High School

Abstract

The purpose of this project was to find out whether the use of authentic materials would be efficient when utilized during an English lesson at school. It is important to emphasize that these authentic materials were created by native speakers of English, so our challenge was to adapt them for an EFL classroom. This project was based on the design and application around an English lesson plan to engage students from the eighth level of basic education at Simon Bolivar School in learning English as a Foreign Language with the use of authentic materials. Before planning the lesson, it was necessary to research for information about the benefits, importance, advantages and disadvantages of using authentic materials in an EFL classroom. This research helped us to find out important and crucial factors in order to select these authentic materials, so that students’ needs in our educational context could be satisfied. As a result, it was observed that students felt motivated with the way the class was carried out. The use of authentic materials certainly resulted efficient at the time of motivating students to develop speaking skills. Therefore, we hope to contribute in some way to our daily teaching practice