The description of the artefact, the functionality of each item and the use of the characteristics of authentic activities are as follow.

The Interface:

The learning environment was developed on Moodle®. When users locate their browsers on the home page they see the editor’s office. In this office there is a desk which has links to example articles, past issues of the newsletter, a notebook, a computer, resources to use, editor’s agenda and assessment. Also, there is a calendar on the wall and a door opening to the staff meeting room.

Past issues of the newsletter: Users were able to access the past issues of the newsletter online in pdf form. This provided students with the opportunity to use the information from the previous issues as source and models.

Notebook: Students were able to take notes while using the learning environment.

Computer: By clicking on the screen, users were able to reach some online resources such as tips on giving effective presentations, a concordance and dictionary & thesaurus.

Resources to use: Learners were expected to use external sources to support their opinions or to give factual information about their proposal. In order to facilitate learning how to find resources learners were supplied with sources such as scanned newspaper articles and web-based articles.

Editor’s agenda: An agenda was developed in order to inform the learners, in an authentic way, about the problem topics that they could investigate and propose a possible solution.

Assessment: Assessment was based on the can do statements of CEFR. A link was provided to inform students of the assessment breakdown showing the different components and how they contribute to the total grade, making it transparent for learners.

Calendar: Calendar was used to inform learners about the key activities and the due dates.

Staff meeting room: Staff meeting room was the discussion forum. This forum was mainly used to ask learners guided questions and scaffold their learning. For example, students were asked to investigate the example articles and comment on the importance of each element (Look at the body paragraphs and discuss: What are the elements of a body paragraph? Why is it necessary to include them in the body of an essay?).

The Characteristics of Authentic Activities:

Design principle 1: Authentic activities have real-world relevance

Unlike school type exercises which involve students in producing a given form or pattern, or expressing a given function, rather than saying what they feel or want to say (Willis, 1996), in this activity learners were required to produce an article to be published in the newsletter which would be accompanied with another product such as a video, poster, or brochure to further inform or educate the target audience.

Design principle 2: Authentic activities are complex and ill-defined

The learning environment and the task required learners to go through ill-defined stages that were not laid out in any sequential manner by the teacher. This increased the complexity and difficulty level of the activity to reach a solution or conclusion. Because of its ill-defined and complex nature, learners needed to spend more mental and interactional effort over a sustained period of time, while defining a path of action to complete the activity.

Design principle 3: Authentic activities provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from different perspectives, using a variety of resources

The major perspectives while completing the activity were: focus on author, focus on content, focus on form, focus on audience, and focus on process. Each of these not only provided the opportunity to develop target knowledge and experience but also helped to develop higher order thinking skills.

Design principle 4: Authentic activities provide the opportunity to collaborate

Collaboration was a key design feature that facilitated learning. Collaborating helped learners further develop in terms of content, problem solving skills, and language skills.

Design principle 5: Authentic activities provide the opportunity to reflect

Reflection provided students with meaningful discussion that enhanced learning and experience. In this respect, learners had opportunities at different stages to reflect on the learning resources, (e.g., interactive essays), problem solving, (e.g., while designing and producing their newsletter), and learning strategies, (e.g., at the end of their presentations in class where they were formally required to reflect on their learning strategies and the processes that they employed).

Design principle 6: Authentic activities lead beyond domain- and skill-specific outcomes

This guiding characteristic suggests that the product-oriented nature of the authentic activities led to the creation of products that comprised real communication and that focused on multiple skills rather than on single one-dimensional responses. The learning activity allowed students to produce stories that authentically captured communication and incorporated reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, along with the further development of grammar and vocabulary knowledge.

Design principle 7: Authentic activities are seamlessly integrated with assessment

The learning activity provided learners with opportunities to use the target language in context. In this respect, assessment provided learners with opportunities to gauge what they could do with the target language in practice. Thus, even though the activity was completed both in class and in the online environment, learners were able to reflect on their language skills by referring to ‘can do’ statements (Council of Europe, 2001) and revealing the strengths and weaknesses of their communication skills rather than linguistic knowledge.

Design principle 8: Authentic activities yield polished products valuable in their own right rather than as preparation for something else

Writing articles for a newsletter allowed learners to establish real communication between the audience and themselves and to move away from school-type exercises that only provided practice on a text book or teacher-prepared forms.

Design principle 9: Authentic activities allow competing solutions and diversity of outcome

The activity was open-ended allowing competing solutions and diversity of outcome. It was observed that having the freedom and the opportunity to use any language structure within their repertoire, or by acquiring new structures to write their stories, learners were able to convey different messages and text styles, even though some students worked on identical topics. It was observed that this was not only a key factor in achieving authentic outcomes, but was also a motivating factor as learners provided genuinely diverse and engaging stories.

Design principle 10: Authentic activities are conducive to both learning and communicating

When learning is embedded in real-world, relevant activities that maintain a communicative purpose and provide opportunities to learn new structures in context—while at the same time practising existing knowledge—learners develop a more robust knowledge. This is what this activity provided to the learners. Learners communicated their messages through their products and while producing the products they acquired new structures.

Design principle 11: Authentic activities provide motivational factors

Motivation was achieved through:

• providing a challenge that is tied to a goal

As the major task and challenge, learners were required to conduct research and collect data on a problem that had social significance and to propose a possible solution that would be published as an article in the newsletter. The subtasks were intended to inform the audience further on the background of the issue or to create awareness about other aspects of the issue, for example, a video on drink driving and its possible consequences.

• giving students real world tasks (rather than "read the text and answer the following questions") with authentic roles

Learners’ taking the role of a member of an editorial board and publishing articles for a newsletter as if they were a journalist, encouraged and motivated them to go through the challenging steps towards the completion of the activity.

• giving students a challenge appropriate at the level of their expertise (ZPD)

Writing articles and publishing a newsletter was not beyond the learners’ perceived capacities and thus motivated them as it was more enjoyable than school type exercises.

• involving students to a problem solving process that is (socially) significant for them

Targeting an authentic problem and authentic audience, providing their own solution and publishing were motivational aspects of the activity.

• providing ownership on the problem and the process to solve it

Learners’ self-determining the problem to research and providing their own solutions gave them ownership over the problem solving process.

• providing freedom and control over the problem solving process

Learners decided how and where to gather the data from rather than brainstormed ideas in class.

• publishing student work

Publishing student work provided them with motivation in terms of developing more convincing arguments. Publishing students’ work was accomplished by printing the final articles in a newsletter that was later distributed at school and by doing public presentations in class.

For more information:

Ozverir, I., Herrington, J., & Osam, U. V. (2016). Design principles for authentic learning of English as a foreign language. British Journal of Educational Technology, 47(3), 484-493.

Ozverir, I., Osam, U. V., & Herrington, J. (2017). Investigating the effects of authentic activities on foreign language learning: A design-based research approach. Educational Technology & Society, 20(4), 261–274.