Simon Gill, Olomouc University, Czech Republic
However well-equipped the
circumstances a teacher works in may be, there is, it seems, always room for
more in the way of resources. I know so many teachers who, like me, are
afflicted with what can only be described as a mild form of kleptomania, and it
is for them, principally, that this paper is written. In it I would like to
share my enthusiasm for advertisements as a tool for language and cultural
learning.
1. Why advertisements?
Several reasons suggest
themselves:
1. ubiquity They are all around us, in newspapers and
magazines, on the TV and radio, on handbills and flyers, on billboards and
vehicles in the street, even, sometimes, on the clothes we wear.
2. availability It is extremely easy to get hold of
advertisements in a variety of media. They can be cut out of paper
publications, recorded from the media, photographed, or downloaded from the
Internet, and my experience is that many firms are all too happy to send
publicity materials if approached directly. It is perhaps also worth stressing
at this point that I do not advocate the use only of advertisements in English.
Those in both the learners’ own language and even in others may be of great
value as well.
3. cost I have never paid a penny for any of the
numerous advertisements I have in my possession, a claim I am unable to make
for most of the other types of teaching aid I have collected down the years.
Until teachers’ salaries become less niggardly, this will, unfortunately, have
to remain a significant consideration.
4. authenticity Advertisements are highly authentic, in that
they are something which every student, however remote their surroundings, comes
into contact with on a more or less daily basis.
5. variety Advertisements come in a remarkable range of
formats, media, shapes, sizes and durations, ranging from, at one end of the
spectrum, home-made handbills glued to bus shelters to, at the other, ongoing
global multimedia campaigns conducted by transnational corporations.
6. images Advertising budgets are often huge.
Frequently, for instance, more money is available to the director of a
thirty-second TV commercial than to the director of a sixty-minute programme.
With resources like this, and given that the basic premise of an advertisement
is to attract would-be buyers in what are often highly competitive markets,
eye-catching, even startling imagery is common. This can be exploited to evoke
both personal and emotional responses and, as such, can be the basis for a good
deal of valuable language work.
7. language The language of advertisements exhibits a
number of stylistic features which make them a rich source of texts. A full
analysis lies beyond the scope of the present paper, but these features may
include, inter alia: repetition of
structurally similar elements; the deployment of fixed phrases and routines;
idiomatic language; the deliberate breaking of rules; wordplay; the use of
mixed registers and even mixed languages, and alliteration and assonance.
8. length Advertisements are often brief, seldom
prolix. This brevity is a point in their favour in contrast to many other types
of text, whose length may be a problem when criteria for selection for
classroom use are applied.
9. generativeness With a little time and ingenuity, a great
variety of classroom exercises and activities can be generated to capitalise on
the potential that advertisements offer.
2. What can advertisements be used
for?
In Gill (1999) I endeavoured to postulate a series of principles that
should, in my opinion, inform and underpin intercultural learning. Briefly, and
with some slight reformulation, they can be summarised as follows:
1.
Cultures are not
monolithic.
2.
Facts alone are
not enough.
3.
We have to try to
objectify.
4.
We need to get
away from stock images and stereotypes.
5.
The relationship
between language and culture, and between language learning and cultural
learning, is both intimate and crucial.
6.
It is important to
compare and contrast.
7.
Individual
insights and experience are important.
8.
How do the general
and the specific relate to each other?
9.
An element of
discovery learning is essential.
10. We need to keep in mind broader educational principles (eg
notions of lifelong education, empowerment etc).
11. The European dimension is important.
Advertisements, in my opinion, offer an invaluable resource that can be
used to help us in putting these principles into practice. By learning how to
‘unpack’ their messages, and the beliefs and values that underlie those
messages, from the layers of language, image and cultural assumption they are
couched in, by reflecting on those messages, beliefs and values, and by a
comparative/contrastive process, learners can be provided with the opportunity
to develop a whole range of cultural awareness skills.
3. How
can advertisements be used?
Maley (1994) suggests twelve ways in which short texts can be exploited:
·
expansion
·
reduction
·
media transfer
·
matching
·
selection/ranking
·
comparison/contrast
·
reconstruction
·
reformulation
·
interpretation
·
creating text
·
analysis
·
project work
An alternative but by no means contradictory model is the following
‘four-stage’ approach, to which I was first introduced in the 1980s (see
‘Acknowledgements’), which can be widely found in use in published materials,
for example in textbooks such as the popular Headway series. The first phase, here called ‘Pre-text activities’,
is chiefly aimed at setting the scene and motivating learners for what is to
follow. The second, ‘Access to text’, is intended to familiarise learners with
the content of the text; the third, ‘Language focus’, involves the learner in
work on areas of language suggested by the text, and the final one, ‘Ideas
focus’, moves on to exploit the text from the point of view of its intellectual
and emotional content.
It should perhaps be emphasised that the expression ‘text’ here is
intended to be taken in its broadest possible sense, to include not just
written and spoken words, but also images of all types. Furthermore, the
approach outlined here is by no means limited in its usefulness only to
advertisements; literary extracts, rock songs, tourist brochures, newspaper
stories, radio news broadcasts, excerpts from TV chat shows and letters to
agony columns are but a few of the other text types to which it might be
equally applicable.
Finally, I would like to point out that I do not claim the following
list of possible classroom activities as either original or exhaustive.
Pre-text activities
Learners can be brought to a state of preparedness to deal with the text
by, among others:
w
focussing on a
parallel topic either in the ‘home’ culture (if the text under study originates
in the ‘other’ culture) or vice versa
w
activating
existing knowledge of and attitudes to topic through such techniques as
brainstorming, reading, fieldwork, research, discussion, or Socratic
questioning
w
the use of related
illustrations, visuals, realia etc
w
prediction of
vocabulary or content of text
w
pre-teaching
vocabulary
Access to text
w
motivational
factors are important (eg dividing text into manageable “chunks”, having a
variety of activities, incorporating an element of fun)
w
it is important to
deal with different types of reading/listening (eg extensive, intensive,
scanning, skimming, comparative, contrastive)
w
reasons to
read/listen should be provided (e.g. through the use of time limits or
pre-questions)
w
different types of
questions should be used (e.g. question-word, yes/no, true/false, information
transfer, multiple-choice)
w
there should be at
least some “open” rather than “closed” questions in order to allow for a
variety of outcomes
Language focus
Depending on the nature of the text and the needs, interests, abilities
and level of the learners, some or (unlikely) all of the following areas might
suggest themselves for exploitation.
w
aspects of grammar
(e.g. verb forms, prepositions, use of articles)
w
vocabulary work
(e.g. opposites, synonyms, definitions, translation, hyponym/ headword
relationship, word fields, connotations)
w
register (e.g.
formal vs informal, spoken vs written, GB vs US English)
w
cohesion and text
organisation
§
spelling and
pronunciation
Ideas focus
Work on this area may take place both in the classroom and elsewhere,
and may be in either oral or written format.
w
oral activities - roleplay/improvisation/drama
-
interviews
-
discussion and debate
-
short talks
-
games
w
written activities - parallel text writing
-
writing letters/postcards
-
writing a paragraph/report/composition
-
summary/text expansion
-
translation
- research work (e.g. fieldwork or work in the library or on the
Internet)
-
project work (e.g. producing a poster, video, wall magazine…)
- art
and craft work
I would like to stress that the exact balance between the four elements
is one that must be determined by a number of subjective considerations: the
text used; the teacher’s goals in using it; the age, language level and
interests of the learners; the time and resources available, and many others.
The list given above is, I reiterate, not claimed to be exhaustive.
However, I believe that the ideas and principles it contains are highly
generative and can be used to guide the production of materials for almost any
teaching/learning situation. In the next section I offer some examples of
classroom materials and activities based on them.
4.
Sample
activities using advertisements
It is not my intention in this
section to give detailed lesson plans based on specific examples of
advertisements; I have lost count of the number of times I have read
descriptions of such lesson plans and felt frustrated at my inability to use
them precisely because I did not have access to the materials concerned.
Therefore, I propose to furnish descriptions which are more general and, I
hope, more generalisable as well.
a. Getting Started
Any work with advertisements is
perhaps best preceded by general work on the nature of advertising, from which learners should emerge with an
overview of what sort of products and services might be the subjects of
advertising, what sort of generic techniques are used, which sectors of the
population advertising is targeted at, and which media are used in this
process. This can itself be a rich fountain of activity and research-based
learning as learners collect and analyse material from their own surroundings
and present it in class. It is a simple matter for teachers to prepare
worksheets and tasks to guide the learners in this process. They could be
guided to, for example, billboards in their town, advertising on national TV,
cinema ads, radio ads, ads in the newspapers or magazines they or their friends
and families read, flyers and junk mail, and so on.
b. Producing an advertisement
Once learners are aware of the
range of possible advertisements, a simple next step is to ask them to produce
their own. The teacher may choose to give them total freedom or may impose
parameters. Depending on the age and level of the class, the ‘product’ that may
be required of them could range from the very simple, such as an A4
mini-poster, up to something much more complex and sophisticated, for example a
radio ad to be recorded, a TV advertisement to be put on videotape, or an
information brochure to promote their class, their school, their town, a local
restaurant etc to English speakers.
c. ‘Unpacking’ an advertisement
Using the four-step approach
outlined above, many advertisements can be ‘milked’ for a great deal of both
language and cultural work. Examples I have in my possession include:
¡
A TV advertisement promoting the eating of meat, in which a
housewife prepares a
meatless meal for her teenage
sons, who recoil in horror as it is served and chorus “What? No meat?” Possible
activities: initial discussion about what the students knew about British food
and how it compared to Czech (or Polish, or whatever) food, followed by;
pre-questions designed to focus learners’ attention on the appearance of the
house and its inhabitants and how these could be compared and contrasted with
their own homes; subsequent discussion and research tasks on who does which
chores in the family home or what constitutes a healthy diet, a debate on
vegetarianism, and writing a recipe.
¡
An advertisement from a British magazine produced by The
Refugee Council, with a photograph of a weeping woman and a text in which the
plight of refugees in Britain is described and which concludes with an appeal
for money. Speculation about where the woman might be from, what may have
prompted her to become a refugee, and the sort of problems she might experience
in a strange country; true/false questions about the text; discussion about
what should be done to help refugees and asylum seekers; imaginative writing
involving her diary during her first week in the new country or a letter to a
local MP asking for help; collecting texts from either British or (in my case)
Czech newspapers and researching on the Internet are just a few of the possible
activities in connection with what was, at the time of writing, an extremely
hot political potato in the UK.
¡
A magazine advertisement for Czech ‘Prazdroj’ beer at
Christmas from a Czech magazine, depicting the view from a window. Outside
there is a snowy landscape, a starry sky, and a typical wooden house. In the
window is a bottle of beer and various symbols of a Czech Christmas – a carp,
candles, nuts and an apple. There are also three lines of text. Possible
activities: translating the text; collecting and presenting, either as a short
talk or in the form of a poster, superstitions and beliefs associated with
Christmas; investigating what people in other countries eat for Christmas via
communication with pen pals in either email or snail mail form, or research in
books and magazines or on the Internet; writing a recipe for a Czech Christmas
dinner, or even cooking a British Christmas dinner!
These are, I emphasise, simply
examples. However, I do hope that they illustrate the general principles as
outlined above being applied to specific real advertisements both of British
and Czech origin and that it is clear that they are equally applicable to the
resources that are available to you as well.
d. Internet research
The Internet offers immense
possibilities for student research projects on advertising. A few useful
websites I have found are:
<http://www.adbusters.org/>
– the homepage of a militant anti-advertising organisation, with examples of
their spoof advertisements, details of their philosophy and campaigns, and more
<http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/6560/old.htm>
– a collection of old Coca Cola ads
<http://www.benetton.com> –
the homepage of the Italian clothes firm famous (infamous?) for their use of
controversial and at times shocking imagery to promote their products
<http://www.asa.org.uk/>
– the UK Advertising Standards Authority, complete with their code of practice,
examples of offending ads, details of the complaints against them and their
responses…, and, from America,
<http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr4kids/sgrmenu.htm> – where the ‘Surgeon General’s Report 4 Kids About Smoking’ includes a section in which American children critique the images used by the tobacco industry and which provides a good example of how cultural and language learning can be promoted using materials available on the Net.
Once again, these are just
examples. It is easy to use a standard search engine to find URLs for other
sites connected to specific products and services, and further practical ideas
and URLs can also be found in Eastment et al (2000).
5.
Conclusions
In this article it has only been
possible to sketch out very briefly a few of the possibilities that
advertisements offer the teacher. I hope I have managed, though, to communicate
my fervent belief that they exhibit a number of features, as described in
Section 1, that make them an extremely valuable resource for the teacher and
that this resource can be drawn upon to mine a rich seam of potential both for
language and cultural learning in a wide variety of teaching/learning
situations. I would greatly welcome correspondence from any colleagues who
share my enthusiasm for them at <mailto:pangill@hotmail.com>.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Tony Wright, now
of the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, who first introduced me to the
four-phase approach to texts used here, and Michael Houten, now of the British
Council in Kraków, who was
involved in shaping many of the ideas in this paper during our work together in
the 1990s.
§
Eastment D, D Hardisty & S Windeatt (2000) The Internet Oxford: OUP
§
Gill S (1999) “Culture in the classroom: ten modest
proposals” in Network 2/1
§
Maley A (1994) Short
and Sweet London: Penguin