Can ESL Students Identify Emphatic Features of Advertisements?

Abstract

The present study aimed at investigating ESL students’ ability to comprehend and identify emphatic structures in advertisements, to find out the emphatic features that are easy to identify, and those that are difficult to identify. Sixty ESL college students in the fifth semester of the translation program who were enrolled in a Stylistics course took a test which consisted of a Mazda advertisement. The students were asked to identify the emphatic features of the Mazda advertisement and give two examples to illustrate the feature they give. Analysis of the subjects’ correct responses showed that the emphatic structures that the students identified correctly are: Balanced sentence structure (53%), repeating key words (53%), arranging ideas in the order of climax, i.e. order of importance with the strongest idea last (45%), using active voice (33%), changing sentence length abruptly (33%), placing important words at the end of the sentence (32%), using periodic sentences (30%), placing emphatic words after a colon or a dash (27.5%), putting a word or phrase out of its usual order (23%) and identifying intensifiers, extraposition, exclamatory sentences, using anticipatory ‘it’, and changing sentence types together (20%). The emphatic structures in the advertisement proved to be difficult for the students to recognize because the advertisement draws an analogy between Mozart's musical genius and the Mazda car-making philosophy, emphasizing how both creations are driven by emotion, vision, and craftsmanship. The advertisement employs multiple emphatic techniques simultaneously, which may have overwhelmed the students and constituted a cognitive load. The Mazda advertisement does not just inform, rather it immerses the reader in an emotional experience through syntactic and lexical emphasis. Instead of focusing on emphatic structures, the students were probably more engaged in decoding the poetic message and understanding the content rather than analyzing how structural elements shape emphasis. In other words, the analogy between Mozart’s music and the Mazda car, made the students less attentive to structural manipulations. Further causes of advertisement comprehension problems and recommendations for instructional techniques that would help enhance the students’ ability to comprehend and identify emphatic structures in genre-specific texts are given.