practical. (useful) Listening to music is said
Focus 4: Language of Persuasion
Objectives
By the end of the focus, students will be better able to:
understand and analyse methods of persuasion in advertisements
use methods of persuasion in a practical setting through a role-play
identify the persuasive devices used in arguments and analyse different degrees of persuasiveness
write a short persuasive speech
Time Needed
3 hours 50 minutes
Learning / Teaching / Assessment Tasks / Activities
Students look at and discuss some cigarette advertisements
They study some examples of argument and discuss their degree of persuasiveness
They identify persuasive devices such as emotional and personal appeal in a speech
They apply different forms of appeal and persuasive language they have learnt in a shopping game and an advertisement design activity
They write a speech to persuade others to stop smoking
Materials Required
Handouts on “Language of Persuasion”
Internet access
Poster size paper
Learning English through Debating
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Language of Persuasion
Teacher’s Notes
Introduction
The activities in this focus will prepare students to analyse persuasive language and use it for debating. They also seek to develop students’ awareness of how the use of certain language structures (e.g. modal verbs of obligations) can enhance persuasiveness.
Students will be given ample opportunities to apply the skills through a buying and selling game, designing an advertisement and writing an anti-smoking speech.
Learning Activity 1: Warm-up
5 minutes
Go through the tongue twisters and ask students to read after you. As they feel more comfortable, ask them to read faster on their own.
Learning Activity 2: Group discussion
20 minutes
Conduct this activity in the computer room or multi-media laboratory with Internet access if possible. Ask students to visit the websites listed in their handouts and study the advertisements in groups to complete the chart.
Possible answers:
Created by Website Promoting
smoking?
(yes / no)
Adjectives
1. Winston http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/adgallery/d
isplay.php3?ID=275 yes cool
sexy 2. Virginia
Slims
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/adgallery/d
isplay.php3?ID=288 yes relaxed beautiful 3. Marlboro http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/adgallery/d
isplay.php3?ID=21 yes macho
cool
4.
The National Health Service (UK)
http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/health/Smoki
ng-820.html no painful
horrifying
5. Khaleej Times http://www.holgerappel.com/archives/2008
/01/entry_556.html no frightening threatening
6. Camel http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/adgallery/d
isplay.php3?ID=72 yes beautiful confident
7. Lucky Strike http://smokershack.wordpress.com/categor
y/ad yes joyful
happy festive
8. Vikas Naik http://www.holgerappel.com/archives/2008
/01/entry_554.html no deadly
fatal
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Encourage students to come up with more adjectives to describe the images in the advertisements and accept any reasonable answers.
Catering for Learner Diversity
For less advanced students, you may ask them to work on fewer advertisements and provide an adjective for each advertisement as an example before asking them to come up with more. Alternatively, you may ask students to focus on their feelings after looking at the advertisements (e.g. afraid, unhappy) and help them to express these feelings with more advanced adjectives (e.g. worried / worrying, scared / scary) depending on their abilities.
For more advanced students, you can enlarge their vocabulary by introducing more synonymous adjectives (e.g. synonyms of “frightening” such as scary, shocking, fearful, chilling, horrifying, gruesome) and adjectives that are less familiar to them (e.g. unsettling, disturbing, sickening, alarming).
Learning Activity 3: Language of appeal
60 minutes
Explain to students the similarity between advertisements and debating. Both the advertiser and debater seek to advocate an idea and persuade others to believe in it. A debater particularly aims to convince the audience (including the adjudicators) that their ideas are better than their opponents’.
Explain to students what emotional and personal appeals are. Emphasise that these appeals are persuasive devices that make a speech more dramatic, vivid and powerful to the audience. Logical appeal is also important but this will be dealt with in detail in the next focus.
After students understand that effective use of various forms of appeals can strengthen an argument, get students to read the following statements and decide their level of persuasiveness (weak / average / strong). Ask students to justify their answers.
Possible answers:
Statement Degree of
persuasiveness
Explanation
Smoking causes cancer. weak The statement is factual and contains no emotional language that appeals to the audience.
Smoking is bad. Don’t smoke. weak The statement is general and has little emotional appeal.
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Smoking will kill you! Each cigarette shortens your life by 11 minutes.
strong The statement uses specific information (i.e. 11 minutes) to increase its general
credibility. Words such as
“you” and “your” are used to address the listeners and to create more emotional response.
Smoking will cause your lungs to rot and lead to early death.
strong The statement uses very specific words (e.g. “rot”) to create vivid images in the audience’s mind.
Smoking causes bad breath and yellow teeth.
average The statement contains some details and images, but the language used could be more emotional.
If students have alternative answers or different views, encourage them to explain why.
Their answers should be accepted if they can justify them in a reasonable manner.
Catering for Learner Diversity
For less advanced students, you might complete the first and third statements with them and explain why the former statement is not as persuasive as the latter. This will give students a better of idea of how the strength of an argument can be assessed and enhanced with concrete facts and detailed descriptions.
For more advanced students, you might ask them to enrich the weaker sentences with details to strengthen their persuasiveness.
A. Emotional appeal
1. Explain to students that emotional appeal comes from language and images that arouse our five senses. In pairs, ask students to complete the right column by writing emotional words to describe different aspects of smoking. Ask them to consider which aspect of smoking has the strongest sensory or emotional impact on the audience.
Possible answers:
Aspect of smoking Emotional words
The smell of cigarette smoke e.g. terrible e.g. unpleasant
• choking • disgusting
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Aspect of smoking Emotional words
The look of yellow fingers e.g. disgusting • ugly
• hideous • unattractive
The appearance of a person with throat cancer
e.g. pale e.g. unsettling
• unhealthy • pitiful
The taste of food when someone has been smoking nearby
e.g. awful • charcoaled
• stale • nasty
The feeling of not being able to breathe
e.g. suffocating e.g. sickening
• frightening • breathless
2. Have students watch one of the following videos and discuss what emotional language and images they see in it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLtvqbdiPrY&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hySFt8O11A&feature=related
Catering for Learner Diversity
For less advanced students, you may provide them with a few adjectives to choose from for each item in the table and ask them to tick the appropriate ones. Below are some examples:
Aspect of smoking Emotional words
The smell of cigarette smoke dizzy disgusting
dusty refreshing
The look of yellow fingers healthy dirty
unpleasant ugly
The appearance of a person with throat cancer
painful pitiful
comfortable unlucky The taste of food when someone has
been smoking nearby
nasty delicious
tasty stale
The feeling of not being able to breathe
sick uncomfortable
relaxed frightening
You may ask students to explain their choices when you check the answers with them.
For more advanced students, you might like to play both video clips and ask students to list examples of emotional appeal. You may then ask students to discuss in groups which of the clips is more powerful and convincing.
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B. Personal appeal
Personal appeal focusses on backing up the message with first-hand experience.
Ask students to consider who knows most about the harm of smoking. Then play the following video featuring the actor Yul Brynner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTTY2vTsGho
For background information, you may ask students to search online for biographical data about Yul Brynner. Alternatively, you may tell them that Yul Brynner was a famous actor who starred in a number of Hollywood films, notably The King and I (1956), and he made this anti-smoking commercial before he died of lung cancer.
Ask students whether Yul Brynner is a reliable person to speak in an anti-smoking commercial and have them explain the reasons. Students would most probably be able to point out that he is a reliable source of information because he had first-hand experience as a heavy smoker who suffered from lung cancer.
After explaining the concept of personal appeal with the example of Yul Brynner, you can go on asking students who else has special authority on this topic and what they might say about smoking. Ask students to explain how people listed in the left column of the table can be considered a special authority and complete the last column with words that describe them. All reasonable answers should be accepted.
Possible answers:
Person Kind of special authority Words to describe the person Someone who has
lung cancer from smoking
knows what the disease is like, and so is keen to tell others not to follow in his / her footsteps
experienced, knowing
A doctor who has treated patients who died from smoking
committed to saving smokers suffering from deadly diseases, witnesses their unnecessary deaths and the harm of smoking
professional, expert, compassionate, concerned, wanting to prevent future deaths
A scientist who has done experiments on the effects of smoking
proves the hazards of smoking with evidence from research studies
scientific, expert, committed to the truth
The husband or wife of a person with lung cancer or heart disease caused by smoking
feels the pain of losing loved ones to smoking – related diseases
in pain and grief
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Catering for Learner Diversity
For less advanced students, you may ask them to complete just one column instead or restrict the number of boxes they have to fill out by providing answers in some of them.
Alternatively, you may provide some adjectives (e.g. knowledgeable, compassionate, committed, scientific) as choices and explain their meanings to students before they complete the right column.
Learning Activity 4: Reading
45 minutes
A. Vocabulary
This is a pre-reading vocabulary exercise that will help students to learn new words related to the topic of smoking. If students come across a difficult word, encourage them to scan through the speech quickly and guess its meaning from the context before consulting a dictionary.
Answers:
1. J 2. G 3. I 4. A 5. F 6. C 7. B 8. D 9. E 10. H
B. Identifying persuasive devices
Get students to read the article and identify the different kinds of appeal used.
Suggested answers:
Key: = Personal appeal = Emotional appeal
[It is school assembly. A man of about 40 steps forward to make a speech.]
My young friends, I want to talk to you today about smoking. Most of you don’t smoke. I know that, but I still need to speak to all of you. Some of you may decide to take up smoking later. I hope not and I hope you will persuade your friends not to smoke. They may listen to you even when they don’t listen to older people like me. I care about you, the younger people, and I don’t want to see any of you suffer the bad effects of smoking.
Why should you listen to me? Well, when I was your age, I was a smoker. My friends smoked, so I also smoked. I liked the way smokers shared their cigarettes.
It was friendly. And I found a sort of quiet and relaxation when I lit a cigarette at the end of a hard day at school. My parents tried to persuade me not to smoke,
Personal appeal (e.g. citing his own experience as example and frequent use of “I” and
“me”)
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but I didn’t listen to them, because they smoked more than I did. Then something happened that changed everything for me.
My mother had a cough all the time. It was the kind they call a “smoker’s cough”.
It got worse over time, but that seemed normal. Then she had difficulty breathing and started to cough up blood. She didn’t want my father and me to see that. She also didn’t want to go to the doctor. Finally, my father and I persuaded her to go.
She had some tests, and it was a long wait. Both of us went to the doctor’s office with her when the results came back. The chest radiograph showed a big discoloured and rotten area in the left lung. She had lung cancer, and it was far advanced. The doctor thought she had a chance with chemotherapy. Do you know what chemotherapy is? They put poison into a person’s body, trying to kill the cancer. A lucky person just becomes very ill, loses all her hair, and suffers incredible pain. An unlucky person goes through all these things, and then dies.
My mother lived for another year. Before she died, she begged me to quit smoking. I quit.
At my mother’s funeral, I made a decision: quitting smoking is not enough.
I would try to see that other young people like me do not begin. And that is why I am here, talking to you.
My friends, you know that the scientific proof is there. Cigarette smoke damages your lungs, from the first day, from the first cigarette. That damage increases the probability of cancer over time. Some smokers get lung cancer. Some of them get heart disease, or other diseases that come from smoking. There are few lucky smokers who never get any of these things. If you smoke, you are 20 times more likely to get lung cancer. If you smoke, you are twice as likely to die before the age of 65. If you smoke, your life will almost certainly be shorter. The logic is easy. The determination to quit is hard.
I know it’s hard as I have lived through all this, but you mustn’t put your life at risk! You should break this habit for your own good.
Quit smoking. Say no to cigarettes. Don’t hesitate and start from today!
Emotional appeal (e.g. vivid and detailed description that appeals to one or more of our five senses)
Personal appeal (e.g. citing his own experience as example and frequent use of “I” and
“me”)
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Catering for Learner Diversity
For less advanced students, instead of asking students to identify different kinds of appeal from the whole speech, you may focus students’ attention on selected paragraphs / sentences and ask students to point out the types of appeal used.
For more advanced students, you may ask them to identify the example of logical appeal (though not covered in detail in this focus) after they finish working with the personal and emotional appeal.
If you smoke, you are 20 times more likely to get lung cancer. If you smoke, you are twice as likely to die before the age of 65. If you smoke, your life will almost certainly be shorter.
You may encourage them to identify other rhetorical devices that enhance the impact of a speech and introduce them to features such as:
Repetition – “But if you smoke, you are 20 times more likely to get lung cancer. If you smoke, you are twice as likely to die before the age of 65. If you smoke, your life will almost certainly be shorter.”
Modal verbs – “you mustn’t put your life at risk! You should break this habit for your own good.”
Imperatives – “Quit smoking. Say no to cigarettes. Don’t hesitate and start from today!”
C. Comprehension
Ask students to answer the questions based on information from the article.
Possible answers:
1. To encourage young people to stop smoking if they have started and not to take up if they haven’t
2. Teenagers
3. The speaker’s mother had cancer and before she died, she asked the speaker to quit smoking.
4. Smokers are 20 times more likely to get lung cancer and they are twice as likely to die before the age of 65.
5. It is effective. The speaker uses strong modal verbs such as “mustn’t” and
“should” to warn the audience of the danger of smoking and urge them to quit it. Imperatives are also used in the last three sentences to create a sense of urgency and to appeal for immediate action. (Any well-justified alternative views should also be accepted.)
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Learning Activity 5: Buying and selling game
20 minutes
This learning activity requires students to apply the knowledge of various forms of appeal and persuasive devices they have acquired from previous tasks in a practical situation – buying and selling.
Ask students to bring to class objects that they do not need anymore (e.g. used stationery items, a clock that no longer works, an old T-shirt). Ask students to get into groups of four.
Each group should decide on an object to sell and discuss how to persuade other classmates to buy it.
Each group will be given three minutes to promote their item. After the presentations, students will each vote for the object that they would buy (but they cannot choose the one from their own group). The group receiving the most number of votes wins the game.
Remind students to use different forms of appeal and persuasive language when they sell items and ask them to jot down some of the strategies or phrases they have used in the box on the students’ handouts.
Learning Activity 6: Creating an advertisement
40 minutes
The purpose of this learning activity is to allow students to synthesise the skills of persuasion they have learnt. Ask students to create an advertisement to discourage smoking in groups of four or five. Tell students that they may include pictures and slogans in their advertisement.
Each group should give a three to four-minute presentation on their advertisement to the rest of the class. You may remind students of the skills of presentation (e.g. voice projection, eye contact), which they have learnt in the Compulsory Part. Tell them that all group members should speak for about the same amount of time and they may wish to talk about:
• the message they want their poster to deliver
• their target audience (if applicable)
• the design of the poster
• the persuasive devices used
Catering for Learner Diversity
For less advanced students, you may provide examples to illustrate how short, catchy slogans can be created using language structures they have learnt (e.g. imperatives).
Examples:
1. Smoking kills!