Abstract:

The paper presents innovative ways of teaching foreign languages for specific purposes through the use of advertisements for meat products with special regard to English, French, and Italian. Besides the grammatical and linguistic exercises, the students have to pay attention to logos, colours, images, and background music, all of which are symbols with a message.

Any language level can benefit from the use of advertising as a teaching tool. We would emphasise its brevity, attractiveness, and semiotic richness. The documents are very brief and concentrated, so the learner does not have to deal with a complex text where they can get lost if they don't understand the context and therefore lose motivation. For the teacher, this conciseness also has advantages, as the short duration of the documents means that they can repeat and reuse selected advertisements without tiring the audience too much. All advertising has two main ingredients: its ability to inform and its persuasiveness. In addition to aesthetics, we should also add that advertising shows us condensed, lively, and linguistically rich information that is semiotic and socio-cultural. Because it is an authentic document, it gives us an idea of the target society. The entire message is contextualised, which makes it possible to construct a didactic approach based on text and image thanks to the richness of the text and images.

Keywords:

Didactics, meat-product commercials, semiotics, foreign languages for specific purposes.