AbstractDaskalos, Konstantinos & Jellum Ling, Jeppe (2005)Authentic texts or adapted texts – That is the question! The use of authentic and adapted texts in the study of English in two Swedish upper secondary schools and a study of student and teacher attitudes towards these texts. Skolutveckling och ledarskap, Lärarutbildningen 60 p, Malmö HögskolaThe aim of this paper is to find out which attitudes teachers and students have towards authentic and adapted texts used in the teaching of English in two Swedish grammar schools. Furthermore, the paper aims to demonstrate the importance of proper text selection in relation to student motivation.To achieve this, a survey was conducted with second year students in two different schools; on top of this, several interviews were conducted with students as well as an interview with a teacher. This was done to demonstrate the different attitudes towards the textbook and authentic texts and to illustrate the importance of choosing topics that students can relate to.The results show that students preferred to read authentic texts. These texts provided them with interesting topics. The teacher also preferred to use authentic texts and agreed that authentic texts usually created an active classroom, but pointed out that to substitute the textbook entirely with authentic material was unrealistic. Therefore, a combination of the two types of text would be preferable.