Two of the main goals I want my students to achieve with the unit are related to the persuasive language of advertising and the way of presenting it visually. A third one has to do with cultural awareness.
The World of Advertising
Throughout the unit, I will equip students with the tools to recognize and use effective grammatical structures. I will provide them with appropriate activities by which they will practice reading and writing in Spanish, as well as lead to an improvement of their critical thinking skills. In order to do so, we will use articles from on-line magazines such as "Revista Brandlife" (Spain), "Revista LatinSpots" (Argentina) and others, as well as the following strategies:
Ads and Billboards
Students will learn how to interpret magazine advertisements and billboards by analyzing the language and the visuals. They will first have to find 2 to 3 different advertisements from magazines, newspapers and websites. The teacher will first sample a couple of analyses to establish the pattern to follow. Students and teacher will collaboratively analyze some other graphic ads during class time such an exercise will help students to get more comfortable with such as task. Students will then have to narrow their choices to one example of each (that is, one billboard and one ad). The will follow a rubric in order to be aware of the criteria the teacher will follow in order to grade this mini-project. Presentation of one of the analyses will be required for this assignment. Other students will be able to grade their classmates following another rubric teacher will provide, focusing in various aspects such as creativity, clarity in the exposition, development of ideas and so on.
Commercials: Radio and Television
Students and teacher will view a number of television commercials representing different countries and a variety of products, scrutinizing the language and analyzing visuals to the detail in order to practice listening comprehension, as well as description of situations in the target language. We will finally comment on difference and similarities these commercials have with current popular American commercials.
Every day, as an opening activity, students and teacher will watch one or two commercials , analyzing them first informally and later on, in depth. Students will get familiar with the analysis so they will be able to distinguish between the idea, its formal and aesthetic organization.
Final Project: Design an Ad
As a final Project, students will have to produce an original ad following a rubric the teacher will provide, taking into account a specific process that goes from identifying the product the would like to advertise in terms of popularity within their age group. They will next have to decide the format they want to present their final project in: whether they want to make poster/ad, a video or recorded commercial, they will provide the teacher with a draft explaining the idea and process. They will finally have to present their product to the rest of the class, as if they were real ad-men.
The Business World
Ad Business
The teacher will divide the classroom in five different groups asking students to take different roles in an advertising company: one group will represent the creative department, another the traffic department and so on. Once the groups and roles in each are distributed, the teacher will give individual directions to different people in each group. After doing a directed research on-line to find out what are the tasks they are expected to accomplish in their jobs, students will have to work on a brief essay.
In a second stage of this activity, students will have to collaborate with their department "coworkers" in order to write a "role play" of a situation given by the teacher that they will have to represent in front of the rest of the agency. The rest of the students will anonymously critique the way they dealt with the situation, as well as the performance and their peers´ use of he language.
Interviews
The teacher will ask students to imagine they are journalists who are interviewing ad-men about their job and how things work in the agency, what are the campaigns they are most proud of and so on. Every student will have to come up with at least well-organized and relevant questions. Students will discuss them in class giving their classmates feedback.
Ideally, the teacher will be able to organize a field trip to one of the 33 advertising companies that are established in New Haven, so the students will be able to ask these questions to real advertisement professionals.
