Friday, November 3, 2006

Teaching EFL/ESL using ads


Here's an idea that I used today in the Proficiency class as a warm up exercise for a listening activity based around advertising. For this you'll need some magazines or newspapers, ideally one for each student.

Lesson plan

1 Give out the magazines and explain to students that there are going to look at the ads in order to find out who reads the publication. The idea is that advertisers choose ones that most reflect the interests and views of their target audience.

2 Now ask them to guess the typical reader's based on the ads the magazine etc. has.

age
gender
education

income

occupation
interests/hobbies

3 Students then discuss their answers with their partner, using various ads to prove their point.

4 Elicit answers from the class.

5 Play the section from the cassette.

Although the TeachIt site is aimed at British students, it is a wonderful place to find interesting exercises that you can do with with FCE (b2 level) and post FCE (c1 and c2 level) students. With a little linguistic tweaking and/or warm up exercise that head off possible language difficulties, many of the activities make for a wonderful alternative to the dire course books that are usually used at higher levels.

See here for a list of lesson plans (all of which can be printed out!!!) based on advertising. It's the lazy teacher's dream come true. Actually, not really, as the lazy teacher would simply wade through the course book assigned and not bother looking for something else. However, you know what I mean.

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