Wednesday 25 February 2015

What are some of the most effective ways of using TV commercials in the English language classroom?

TV commercials have a number of characteristics that make them highly suitable for language teaching. For example:

They are visually engaging.
They are short - students don't get bored.
They are often topic based.
They include nice, contextualised chunks of language.
They can be used for a range of activities.
They provide examples of authentic speech.
The are often funny.
They can touch us emotionally.
They are memorable.
They often repeat structures or phrases.
The can be chosen to reflect the age group of the class.

I will be exploring some activities to illustrate some of the above in my TESOL Spain talk in Salamanca on Sunday 8th March.



A Worksheet for TV Commercials




The following link is a worksheet to use with commercials.

Commercials Worksheet

How to use the worksheet.

Depending on the lesson/activity/level, delete or add questions and customize your own worksheet.
If you add new questions, save them so each time you use the worksheet you'll have more questions to choose from.


Here are some ideas on how to think about using a TV commercial.

Daniel Brint - ad components

This is presentation from my talk. Thank you very much to everyone who attended and I hope you found it useful. Below you can also find the links to the spots we watched.

Spot On! Presentation


Adopt a dog


Coca Cola



Wind



Chipotle


John Lewis


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