Teaching Media Literacy to Business English Students
Chris ParkerIf you’re teaching Business English to ESL students, media literacy is one of the most important yet overlooked skills that you can teach them. Not only can it add value to your course that your students will appreciate, but it can also help them perform better in English-speaking business scenarios and can be profitable for you when offered as an additional service.
What is media literacy?
Media is any form of mass communication of information, whether it’s a post on the Internet, an advertisement on TV, or something that’s read in a newspaper. Media literacy is the ability to not only understand this type of information, but to analyze it, question it, and determine whether it’s probably true or false.
Teaching your students this skill can help them better understand the business culture in Western societies and how English is used in business contexts, such as advertisements, where persuasive wording and subliminal messaging are regularly used. Your students may even eventually work in media-based industries where they’ll need a deeper understanding of these things to be successful.
Why teach media literacy?
Improved reading comprehension – when students develop media literacy skills, they’re improving their reading comprehension skills by learning how to read actively instead of just passively.
Enhanced critical-thinking skills – as your students learn how to more easily analyze and decipher what they’re reading, they’re developing key critical-thinking skills, which can help them use Business English more effectively in the real world.
Stronger cultural awareness – by having an understanding of how messages are communicated in Western media, your students gain nuanced insights into Western culture and how it differs from their own.
More productive self-learning – teaching your students how to question the messages they see, hear, and read in Western media sources, such as videos on YouTube, allows them to choose higher quality, more authentic sources to learn from and practice English with at home.
Media forms are ever-evolving – while your students may have media literacy skills toward older forms of media, like printed advertisements or TV commercials, newer forms, such as digital media, are constantly evolving.
Additional income opportunities – by offering media literacy lessons as a supplemental service that’s separate from your Business English course, you’ll have more opportunities to make money as a teacher.
Activities for teaching media literacy
Before starting any of the activities below, you’ll want to introduce the concept of media literacy to your students with a brief lecture or demonstration and explain how English is used in the business world to persuade audiences to believe something, purchase something, or otherwise respond in a certain way.
During the lecture, you’ll want to show students different forms of media, both digital and printed sources. Have them focus on how the style, syntax, and tone differ between varied sources and how these different things might affect the audiences who read or watch the media.
Question and answer
This activity involves watching commercials while both analyzing them and deciphering everything that’s being communicated, whether overtly or subliminally.
Steps:
1. Watch and analyze
You can start this activity by showing your students commercial advertisements, and YouTube is a great resource for finding these. While your students are watching the commercials, you should instruct them to carefully analyze what they’re watching while taking notes about anything they’re noticing. This might include a particular type of syntax, wording, tone, or anything else that stands out to them.
2. Questioning phase
The next phase during this activity is the questioning phase, where you’ll stop the videos and ask your students critical questions about the commercials they just watched. They should refer to their notes while answering your questions, though this isn’t necessary, as your questions may bring up details about the videos that they hadn’t thought of while watching the ads.
Examples of questions you might ask:
- “What product or service is this advertisement trying to sell to you?”
- “Who is the person pitching this product and why they are doing so?”
- “Is what this person is saying believable or do they seem disingenuous?”
- “How likely are you to buy this product based on what they’re saying?”
- “What are some other reasons why this person may be saying these things?”
While the vocabulary used in these examples is intended for adult business English students, you can use simpler wording for those who are younger or less proficient with English. This activity helps your students learn how persuasive English can be perceived by others and what types of terms, phrases, or tones should be avoided when working in business scenarios.
Sell me this pen
Sell me this pen is a classic activity that’s often used in business scenarios, and some interviewers use it to gauge the selling skills of prospective new hires, so it’s a perfect activity for you to use with your Business English students.
Steps:
1. Pair your students together
This is a paired activity, so the first step is to pair your students together, and while it’s not necessary, it can be helpful to pair students who are at similar English skill levels to each other.
2. Have your students roleplay
Have the students take turns alternating between playing a salesperson role and a prospective customer role. In these roles, the salesperson holds up a pen and describes all the benefits of using it and why the customer should purchase it. The student playing the salesperson role should be as convincing as possible when arguing why the customer should purchase the pen.
3. Review and description phase
After both students have had an opportunity to play the role of salesperson, you should then hold a class discussion where you ask each pair of students what persuasive tactics they used to try to sell the pen to their partners.
4. Analyze the tactics for ethics
Putting your students back into pairs, you’ll now want to have them discuss their tactics with each other and analyze them on an ethical basis. They should be asking each other whether the tactics used were honest or dishonest and provide them with a blank worksheet where they can answer these types of questions in written form so you can review it later.
This activity will help them learn how to better analyze the information that they’re exposed to through the media, but it also has the advantage of teaching students how others might perceive them when they’re pitching a product or highlighting their skills and experience during a job interview.
Tweeting pitches
Twitter has become one of the most popular sites worldwide for creating public messages or announcements that others see, and many companies use it to pitch their services and advertise products. What makes this site unique from many of the other popular social media sites is that users’ posts and comments are limited to 140 characters, and these messages are referred to as “tweets.”
In this activity, your students can practice Business English while learning just how persuasive messages in the media can be, even when they’re limited to fewer words. This activity teaches higher-level English skills because, as researchers at Cornell University pointed out, a message can be more persuasive when it’s simply said in different ways.
Steps:
1. Introduce the concept
Explain to your students how Twitter works, for those who are unfamiliar with it, and ensure that they understand the concept of creating messages that are limited to 140 characters. Show them some examples of business-related tweets that include both a pitch and a call to action (CTA).
2. Create tweets
Have your students create their own tweets, which should also include a pitch and a CTA so they’re business-oriented. If all your students have smartphones or other devices with Internet access, you can have them use mock Twitter tools, like this one at ClassTools, which allow them to create their own fake tweets without signing up for a Twitter account.
If this isn’t feasible, you can simply create worksheets that ask students to write down what they would tweet in 140 characters or less (which is typically around 36 words).
Rewriting media messages
This is a great activity because it not only helps improve your students’ media literacy skills but also allows them to get some hands-on practice with reading, writing, and speaking Business English.
Steps:
1. Analyze a media piece
Show your students an advertisement, a newspaper clip, or any other form of media that uses English business lingo, then ask them to read it and analyze it for a few minutes.
2. Rewrite the piece
After your students have had a chance to read it, ask them to rewrite what they read but with more effective wording. If it was an advertisement, then you’ll want them to use more persuasive wording, and if it was a newspaper article, such as from the finance section of a paper, you’ll want them to write it more concisely or clearly.
3. Read the piece aloud
Once your students have finished writing, you can have them read what they wrote in front of the class. Through peer-to-peer scaffolding, which is where students learn from each other, this can help teach new persuasive wording, business jargon, tones, or other aspects of the media to some students, as they won’t all be at the same level in terms of Business English vocabulary or media literacy skills.
Parting advice and media literacy tools
When teaching media literacy, you should always make an attempt to find out which specific industries your students are interested in entering once they complete your course, and then try to tailor your activities around that to provide more relevancy for them. One great resource that you can use to find more activities is the The News Literacy Project, which is a nonprofit that has many media literacy-focused tools and activities specifically for educators.