Authentic VS. Qualified material in second languages
As you all know, the main difference between authentic vs. Graduated materials is that in the latter, the materials almost always revolve around a particular structure that is presented to the student. For example, if the present tense is, say, “Past tense,” all the speakers in the dialogues or even the texts that are given to the students are in that tense.
It seems as if there is no other time in the whole world. Actually, when talking about the past, for example, native speakers can use a wider variety of verb tenses, sometimes even the present tense:
“Something very funny happened to me last night. I was walking down the street and suddenly a man comes, looks me in the face and says: boy, you are ugly ”.
This is not uncommon in real life, but when it comes to classified materials, you will never encounter these kinds of situations that resemble real life conversations. Despite this, the graded materials are very useful if you want to make students aware of certain structures or patterns that may be important for them to learn. Each context you see will contain many instances of the same structure, allowing you to make inferences about how they are used.
Authentic materials, on the other hand, are real in the sense that they are not created for students as a target audience, but for native speakers. The obvious advantage, of course, is that by using authentic materials, you present students with real everyday language, as it appears in real life. The main disadvantage of these materials, of course, is that they are sometimes not easy for teachers to use and you may have to spend several hours reading or watching videos until you finally find what you need to use in your class. Also, many times in a whole context or situation, you may find only one instance of what you need to present to your students. This could be overcome if you provide students with various situations in which the patterns appear, but again, you must have time to research and gather the appropriate materials.
If time is not an issue for you, you may well spend some time doing this research and you will soon discover that there is a wealth of information that is great for your classroom. However, if you have time constraints, as most teachers unfortunately, a balanced approach may be the solution for you. You can use your graduated materials to introduce the topic and later you can find samples of that structure in authentic materials. Mind you, this won’t be difficult due to the fact that every time native speakers talk about something or write about something, they make use of almost all the tenses and structures of the language. You can even tell your class to review some texts, videos, etc. and find similar constructions. Sometimes a combination of both approaches produces the best of both worlds. It is up to you to decide what might be best for your classroom.