Adapting Authentic Materials for Language Teaching

Verbal ambiguity
Verbal ambiguity can result from the author using a verb in its secondary connotation. What, for example, is the primary connotation of the verb fall?

Original: Sometimes a job falls into two categories.

Rewrite: Sometimes a job belongs in two categories.

Another potential ambiguity arises when a word has different meanings according to its stress, as in the noun re捶cord versus the verb re穋ord?/i>:

Original: Ask workers to record their daily activities.

Rewrite: Ask workers to write down their activities every day.

Ambiguity can also occur when a verb with a positive connotation (e.g., enc

Original: Assembly-line work requires a fairly low level of skills, which encourages poor work quality, since the boredom leads to high rates of absenteeism and turnover.

Rewrite: Assembly-line work requires a fairly low level of skills, which often results in poor work quality.

Definitions

The obvious aim of vocabulary study is having students understand the meaning of words. The four best ways to help the learner understand meanings of words are the use of synonyms, paraphrase, examples, and visuals. Adding these features, where needed, will go a long way to solving the problem of unknown vocabulary.

Syntactic elements

Syntactic elements that can simplify a reading include punctuation, elliptical forms, and parallelism. Of course, another way to simplify a reading is to eliminate difficult structures, such as passives.

Punctuation

If you want to indicate a close relationship between two ideas, you might use a colon instead of a period, as in this example:

Original: Power distance in a company differs by occupation. The more skilled and better educated the occupation, the smaller the power distance.

Rewrite: Power distance in a company differs by occupation: the more skilled and better educated the occupation, the smaller the power distance.

Punctuation can help avoid ambiguity in various ways. For example, dashes梟ot commas梒an help avoid confusion in sentences with commas punctuating a series. In the following example, the rewrite uses dashes instead of commas to set off subordinate information.

Original: Choose option A, the inland location, if the company wants to be closer to major markets, raw materials, and cheap transportation.

Rewrite: Choose option A梩he inland location梚f the company wants to be closer to major markets, raw materials, and cheap transportation.

Elliptical forms and other deletions

Elliptical forms are especially common in conversational language. They provide a strong element of cohesion between sentences. For the language learner, they may also provide a source of confusion, especially when trying to figure out which word was deleted in the process of ellipsis. For this reason, it is sometimes desirable to add the full form back into the sentence, while being careful to keep the material sounding natural. The choice of when to do that depends on the language level of the learner. Notice the example:

Original: Think of power on a scale from low to high. At one end are countries with low power distance.

Rewrite: At one end of the scale are countries with low power distance.

Structural complexity

Structural, or syntactic, complexity includes items such as passives, modifiers, and inverted structures. Because of its complexity, the following example needs a complete rewrite:

Original: Centralization is the degree to which decision making is limited to higher levels of management. Decentralization is the degree to which decision-making power is given to people at lower levels in the company.

Rewrite: Centralized control means that a few people at the top have all the power. Decentralized control means that people at lower levels also influence the decision-making process.

Structures of modification

Because English has so many kinds of modifying structures, some are sure to be confusing. One example is that of mistaking different parts of speech. In the first example below, instead of being read as a modifier, the word developing could easily be confused as a verb, with countries as its object. The problem is easily solved by adding the modifying word many:

Original: Developing countries with different values and social systems are acquiring the new technologies.

Rewrite: Many developing countries with different values and social systems are acquiring the new technologies.

This second example