Perceptions of creativity and authenticity when acquiring a minoritised language as an adult

This paper explores the way in which a highly prescriptive approach to teaching
an additional language allows students to develop the ability to creatively use the target language, and the way in which this impacts upon their understandings of ‘authentic’ language use. It reports the results of a study into teacher and student experiences of acquisition when using a structured teaching approach that was influenced by pedagogy from Situational Language Teaching and the Audio-Lingual Method. This approach uses routines and patterns, as well as chunk learning and formulaic utterances to guide adult learners toward
oral/aural proficiency in Gaelic. Data was created through an online student
survey and interviews with students, tutors and the course author; these data
are supplemented by observation of classes. Results confirmed that lack of
flexibility in the classroom discouraged learners from developing the capability
to creatively use Gaelic, and this is consistent with previous literature in the
area. Our dataset further highlighted that there were issues pertaining to
confidence in ‘authenticity’ rising from the use of formulaic utterances to
teach grammar and lexicon; these issues are exacerbated by the perception of
language standard in a minority language context.