Engaging Students with Authentic Tasks to
Develop Their Writing Skills:
Possibilities within Limitations
Nur Mukminatien
This
paper reports on a classroom practice in Indonesia which links class work
with the real use of English. The term “authentic task” refers to the nature of
the classroom activities which engage students with real-life and meaningful
tasks. The classroom practice was prepared under three basic questions: (1) What are real-life examples of writing the students could
do? (2) How could students’ work be published? (3) Who could be the audience
for the students’ work? In order for the task to be effective, the context
should be understood by the students. The writing activities are selected by
considering the real-life examples of writing with which students might be
engaged in. This is a contextualized classroom practice which has been proven
to be more interesting than the conventional one which is more mechanical and
artificial. This paper provides those EFL teachers who usually believe that
authentic tasks are not applicable in the EFL context with the possibility of
providing students with authentic tasks to develop their writing skills.
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Mukminatien, N. (2002, April). Engaging
students with authentic tasks to develop their writing skills: Possibilities
within limitations. Paper presented at the 37th RELC
International Seminar, Singapore.
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