Enhancing advertising literacy among teenagers: An experiment at a real Secondary Education school in Spain

Abstract

[eng] Teenagers of today are being impacted by thousands of advertisements day by day without even noticing. Advertising has transformed its own industry in order to connect with these digital youngsters, who spend a quarter of their daily hours in front of a screen, whether it is checking their social media, watching some videos, playing a video game or binge-watching the last season of a popular show from Netflix. Today’s advertising is more difficult to recognise and to develop a critical response to it, and schools, as one of the main socialisation agents for teenagers (along with parents and peers), should incorporate interventions and programs that could help them to build up a strong and updated advertising literacy. Based on data from numerous research works and the results from an experiment at a real high school in Spain, this thesis analyses the most common advertising forms adolescents face today, the effects advertising may cause in them, the necessity of enhancing their advertising literacy and, finally, how could it be done at an EFL classroom in Secondary teaching in Spain by designing and delivering an example of a didactic unit. In the light of the outcome of this research, a didactic proposal focused on a centre’s project is presented.