Are authentic materials absolutely necessary in order to have trully communicative activities in the EFL classroom?

To answer this question is necessary to define what are Authentic materials, according to Alejandro G. Martinez Sometimes called authentic or contextualized real-life materials are those that a student encounters in everyday life but that werent created for educational purposes. They include newspapers, magazines, and Web sites, as well as drivers manuals, utility bills, pill bottles, and clothing labels., in contrast to non-authentic materials that are especially designed for language learning purposes. One of the main ideas of using authentic materials in the classroom is to expose the learner to as much real language as possible. Even if the classroom is not a real-life situation, authentic materials do have a very important place within it due to it allowed to increase the students' motivation and interest about to get closer to the target language and culture. On the other hand, the authentic materials are even more relevant for students who have the aim of going to another country in which the acquired language is used. If they were to live in the foreign society they will have to get accustomed to all the trivial items of the language that they will encounter every day. So if the students actually need to be able to communicate and interact socially in the target language environment, authentic materials seem an essential preparation for their task. Being able to cope with an English train timetable, to tell if they have the right ticket, to know which notices are important and addressed to them and which are not, all these are vital to their communicative purpose. However the use of learning materials like the authentic materials dont ensure a true or an advantage for the development of communicative skills in a foreign language, and this idea is put into consideration by some authors like Davis in his quotation ''It is not that a text is understood because it is authentic but that it is authentic because it is understood. Everything the learner understands is authentic for him. (Davies 1984:192), its means that the effective of the material depends of the student focuses and approach that he gave to the material in her learning process.

Reference note Many of the ideas have come from listening to and reading Alan Davies and Henry Widdowson, and from working with Brian Abbs and Mary Underwood. Some of these ideas are available in books and articles such as: A. Davies, 'Textbook situations and idealised language', Work in Progress, Department of Linguistics (Edinburgh), 11, 1978. B. Widdowson, Teaching Language as Communication, OUP, 1978. C. Abbs, VJ. Cook & M. Underwood, Authentic English for Reading 1, OUP, 1980.