Authenticity has been a part of the intellectual resources of language teaching since the 1890s but its precise meaning and implications are contested. This commentary argues for a view of authenticity which recognizes the limits of the concept as a guide for pedagogic practice and acknowledges the fact that texts are processes rather than products. First, authenticity may help to decide what texts not to use in class but provides no guidance about which authentic texts are, for example, motivating. Secondly, the term authenticity is misleading because it leads us to conceptualize authenticity as the bringing of a text from a communicative event into a classroom. Texts are the result of an interaction between what we might term a proto-text, sound waves, or marks on paper or screen, and a language user. The authenticity of a text in the classroom depends on the similarity between the way it is used in the classroom and the way it was used in its original communicative context.
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