Sunday, March 25, 2012
Use of Commercials in Classroom instruction
Over this past week, I have gained a very interesting insight into the use of commercials in classroom instruction. For my commercial Italian class, we were asked to search for an Italian commercial and explain its importance in publicity and how it depicts Italian culture. I found that this was a great approach that is able to be used not only in foreign language instruction but in every content area. For example, to do this activity, I chose a barilla pasta commercial in Italian which depicted a mother and daughter shopping for the pasta and then shows them eating all together as a family. Through this, it depicts the importance of family and food in the Italian culture using a very entertaining approach to sell the product. All in all, using approaches like this are very good ways to teach cultural, linguistic and publicity aspects to students in FL classes as well as other content areas.
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Do you think these commercials accurately reflect Italian culture? Most American commercials just aim to sell a product and the culture gets misconstrued and altered to push the product. For example, they most likely show a nice family enjoying a wonderful dinner because it will sell the product, as people will believe that Barilla pasta will make their family as close as the commercial family. Is advertising in Italy the same as in America? How do the Barilla commercials differ, if at all? I worry that one might not learn the best about culture through commercials, but maybe such a thing could be a great way to look for cultural stereotypes and cultural motifs.
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