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The advantages of TV commercials in teaching English
as a foreign language to adolescents
In modern schools the need to provide new, interesting and challenging materials in teaching English as a foreign language seems to be one of the most important factors. It is especially important in connection with teaching adolescents who are a demanding and very critical group of learners.
Adolescence is the age characterized among many other things by reluctance towards everything what is associated with artificiality and school duty. At this age, peer pressure and the need to make impact on their surroundings are issues of importance for the maturing teenagers.
In view of that, teachers should provide a wide range of materials that allow students to express their often controversial opinions relating to everyday life and their perception of the world. A useful teaching instrument that leads to activating language awareness indispensible in the process of foreign language acquisition seem to be authentic materials. They are defined as any kind of original graphic or audio text aimed at conveying communicative intent to the target audience. Authentic materials include commercial texts, literary texts, films, songs, as well as newspaper articles. Authenticity is a very influential feature, because it stimulates students’ cognitive as well as practical motives in learning a foreign language. Authentic materials attract the student because they relate directly to the world as the student perceives it, unlike the contrived texts presented in coursebooks.
A unique type of authentic material are advertisements. Nowadays they are present everywhere - in newspapers, magazines, on TV, at the cinema, in the Internet or simply in the street. Among many types of advertisements TV commercials seem to be most attractive. In spite of being produced primarily for native speakers of the target language, they are easily available in the world of modern media. That is why their linguistic potential can be easily used in the classroom. A well constructed commercial influences our senses and psyche and can be remembered for a long time. Therefore, the impact of an entertaining commercial can support teachers' efforts.
The main objective of this article is to present adolescents in terms of their intellectual, personality and social development as a group of students who are the best target group to use authentic materials.
The author would like to encourage teachers to take advantage of TV commercials in the TEFL classroom, especially with groups of adolescents who ...
