Title- Understanding language and culture usage through television commercials
Presenter- Barry Kavanagh
Abstract- TV commercials mimic the surrounding culture and society in which they are made and aim to elicit a variety of emotional responses in viewers in a bid to attract their attention and focus them on the product being sold. As a teaching tool within the ESL classroom they can be ultilized in the teaching of culture, media literacy skills and specific aspects of language use such as wordplay as in punning and idiomatic language use.
This presentation will show how TV commercials were used as part of a CLIL media literacy course for Japanese learners of English to illustrate the use of visual humor and wordplay and how these devices reflect, along with the commercial content, the culture and society in which they were made.
Bio- Barry Kavanagh, PhD, teaches English and linguistic courses at Tohoku University. He has presented across Europe and Asia and his main research is within the areas of sociolinguistics, pragmatics and second language acquisition. He is the president of the Tohoku J-CLIL chapter.
