MULTIMODALITY AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE: AN ANALYSIS OF FRANCHISING ADVERTISEMENTS FOR ENGLISH TEACHING

Abstract

The spread of English as an international language (PENNYCOOK, 1994; CRYSTAL, 1997) favored the interest in this language, becoming, in recent decades, a "consumption dream". Given this reality, the language franchises have invested heavily in the advertisement text in order to attract customers to their courses. Besides the linguistic appeals, the images aim to "seduce" the reader, using visual tricks to show the need for mastery of that language. Thus, this study aims at analyzing the images of advertisements in two major franchises of English teaching during the years 2010, 2011 and 2012. For this investigation, we turn to the contributions of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) through their Grammar of Visual Design. With this work, we propose to show how this "product" is built through advertising, since we desire, from this analysis, contribute to the critical formation of English teachers and / or students. Accordingly, we elected the following categories: (a) Representational - conceptual and narrative structures, (b) Interactive - contact, social distance, perspective and modality and (c) compositional - information value, salience and framing. The analysis shows a trend of advertisements in choosing narrative representations that highlight the actions of the actors, since for the consumerist discourse, English is a language that empowers those who hold it. The observers are asked to interact with the image so as to claim the purchase of the product. Famous people who have succeeded are themed with salience, in order to arouse interest.