Advertisements on bill boards, in magazines and newspapers, on the radio and on screen are a powerful part of the environmental print which surrounds us. Children notice pictures and format from an early age and soon become sensitive to their cultural associations: advertisements reflect what we most value, fear and desire. They transmit strong social meanings which we may absorb unconsciously. They can be for ‘good’ purposes – to draw our attention to the merits of worthwhile events, places of interest and institutions. While the profit motive seems a less worthy purpose, some advertisements recommend products in an honest and reasonable manner and the competitive spirit they encourage is an aspect of a free society. The anarchic nature of the Internet raises particular ethical issues about the use of advertisements on this medium. Reading and reflecting on the visual impact of advertisements and on their linguistic devices – persuasive vocabulary, puns, alliteration – has long been part of the English programme for older primary school pupils, reinforced by official guidance. However, younger children are also interested in the effects of this kind of text. I remember seeing a teacher work with seven year olds making posters about caring for the environment. The work had arisen from a shared reading of Julia and Charles Snape’s picture book The Giant. Working in pairs, the children simply did not want to leave their work to go out to play, so absorbed were they in communicating their own environmental concerns to others. Another exciting project on advertising involving young children is written up in Carolyn White’s chapter ‘Somebody makes a choice’ in Visual Images (Callow, 1999). The work took place in Australia and began with the teacher videoing a selection of television advertisements aimed at children. After watching the commercials the children were given task cards and asked to work in pairs. The cards gave each pair one of four tasks: record the colours used; describe the music; describe the characters; record who speaks and what is said. Just beginning to write, the children either asked the teacher to scribe for them or used pictorial representations to record the information. The teacher wrote a summary of the findings in each of the four categories on large pieces of paper for display. White points out that the work was spread over four weeks and was quite challenging for her exuberant five year olds. After studying several commercials, including one advertising McDonald’s, the children and their teacher produced a list (see box on p. 6) of what a children’s commercial needs to be effective. White was interested that the children picked out ‘magic and pretending things’ as a key ingredient – the McDonald’s advertisement was set in a fantasy land showing children following Ronald McDonald along a yellow brick road to find something scrumptious to eat. I have referred to this project in some detail as it shows there are ways of involving quite young children in understanding persuasive texts. Indeed, at the end of the work, one child revealed that what he had learnt was much more than superficial: ‘when you advertise, somebody makes a choice’ – hence White’s chapter title.
If children are to understand the impact of this kind of material we need to build up resources. These include collections of advertisements for the book corner – examples from magazines and newspapers and from radio and television.
The book corner computer is important when it comes to children’s work on their own creations: software programs can help children make professional looking posters of any size. Once the resources are in place we need imaginative projects and tasks to get the children thinking through the issues. The ideas in the list below would be suitable for guided reading or writing in Literacy Time or for work outside it. I find three things helpful. First, learning about advertisements and commercials as kinds of persuasive text is something revisited at different stages through the primary years. Each ‘revisit’ takes the pupils’ understanding further. So teachers adapt ideas for different age groups. Second, wherever possible, it is best for children to design publicity and advertising material for real use. Third, we can help focus children’s work by providing task cards, carefully selected resources and helpful ways of presenting their findings.
English work round advertisements
• Using an interactive whiteboard for collaborative writing of advertisements.
• Analysing an advertisement from a newspaper or magazine as an example of persuasive text, attending to choices at text level (format), sentence level (syntax) and word level (vocabulary).
• Designing and writing advertisements to promote a school event or an imaginary product.
• Experimenting with language and design for advertisements for different media – screen, radio, magazine or bill board (See Sealey, 1996, pp. 30–32 for an exciting case study – children making a radio advertisement for their school).
• Presenting print advertisements to the group showing how linguistic and visual features combine to make an impact on a targeted audience.
• Acting out advertisements designed for television.
• Improvisation round the making of an advertisement involving children taking up the roles of business people paying for the advertisement and of the producer, editor and actors. (A Year 6 class known to me carried out a project like this. Teacher and children greatly enjoyed researching what was involved in each role and the final presentation was shown to the school.)
• Examining ethical aspects of advertising (some of these became apparent in the Year 6 case study referred to above).
• Studying advertising aimed at children (see example from Australia described above in which five to six year olds studied commercials). Older primary children often enjoy analysing advertisements aimed at children younger than themselves. Whatever the age group, it is helpful for them to work out some categories to guide their analysis.
• Making advertisements for constructive and worthwhile reasons for the book corner or posters to advertise a school function.
• Market research using questionnaires and interviews might usefully precede making posters to publicise school events. What would encourage pupils to support the events and how might this be incorporated into the publicity material?
• Specific topics like looking at the use of verse in advertisements and comparing verse for profit and poetry for aesthetic purposes.
• Using advertisements in developing children’s visual literacy and showing, for example, the effectiveness of visual images and how the visual and the linguistic aspects link. Children could be shown a TV advertisement and, in pairs, write down what they notice about aspects like choice of colour, style and image, the appearance of the characters and the way the product is packaged. Then they could discuss how far the language – name and description of product and what people say – matches or extends the visual aspects.
Examining advertisements and commercials and writing their own helps children develop critical abilities in several ways. It certainly draws their attention to how writing can be used to manipulate the reader and change attitudes and behaviour – often purchasing behaviour. We encounter advertisements in every form of media and children should understand the negative as well as the more positive implications (Wray, 1995, p. 90). This kind of work also shows them how purpose and sense of audience interact. The purpose of an advertisement is to affect the perception of a product or event of a target audience. It is a way of helping children imagine how they might reach and impact on ‘the wider community’ which is one of the audiences children are expected to write for in the later primary years (National Curriculum English Orders, EN 3, paragraph 11).
Now that a range of different media are, more than ever, part of our daily experience this kind of work helps develop children’s visual literacy and draws their attention to how text and pictures link.
A children’s commercial needs:
• Bright colours
• Magic and pretending things
• A catchy song or music with a beat
(Based on the list five year olds made with the teacher’s help after a study of television advertisements used in the commercial breaks between children’s television programmes (White in Callow, 1999, p. 45).)
DfEE/QCA (1999) English, The National Curriculum for England London: DfEE.
Sealey, Alison (1996) Learning about Language: Issues for Primary Teachers Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.
White, Carolyn (1999) ‘Somebody makes a choice’ in Jon Callow Visual Literacy: Visual Texts in the Classroom NSW, Australia: Primary English Teaching Association.
Wray, David (1995) English 7–11: Developing Primary Teaching Skills London: Routledge, Chapter 6.
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