Of course, too much hand-holding can be just as unhelpful as over-simplified, made-up texts. Bruner (1983: 60) describes scaffolding as ‘a process of setting up the situation to make the learner’s entry easy and successful and then gradually pulling back and handing the role to the learner as he becomes skilled enough to manage it’. Whatever form of help you give students to get them started with authentic texts – using short texts, on familiar topics, with helpful pictures or diagrams, or staged and scaffolded tasks – over time, that support needs to be withdrawn. As students become more confident and learn the skills needed to deal with texts on their own, the materials they use can provide less and less guidance until eventually the learner is ready to ‘fly solo’.