Working Papers
in Language Education and Research
http://eliworkingpapers.org/

MULTILITERACIES MATERIALS:
EXPLORING PERSUASIVE LANGUAGE
THROUGH HOTEL ADVERTISEMENTS AND
REVIEWS
Name: Danielle Fischer

ISSN 2187-4972

Corresponding Author:danielle-f@kanda.kuis.ac.jp
Publication date: February, 2014

To cite this article:

Fischer, D. (2014). Multiliteracies materials: Exploring persuasive
language through hotel advertisements and reviews. Working Papers
in Language Education and Research, 2 (1), 3-12.

Scroll down for article

Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  MULTILITERACIES MATERIALS:
EXPLORING PERSUASIVE LANGUAGE THROUGH HOTELADVERTISEMENTS AND REVIEWS
Danielle Fischer
Kanda University of International Studies

ABSTRACTThis working paper describes a workshop I conducted at CAMTESOL 2013. I
shared reading and writing materials I had designed based on a multiliteracies
design of reading and writing instruction, adapted for second and foreign
language learners. Such an approach involves using multiple genres of authentic
text to foster students’ awareness of the relationships between the text’s
conventions and context of use, as well as critical reflection (Byrnes et al, 2006;Kern, 2000). The theme of the presented materials was online advertisements andreviews of Japanese inns. The purpose of the workshop was to demonstrate toteachers in training how every authentic text has a purpose and the language
used in the text varies accordingly. The main message I conveyed was thatteachers should make students aware of the connection between language use andpurpose, and teach them how to read between the lines of words to find hidden
meaning. This is a way to ‘empower’ language learners. During the workshop, I
described how students in my IC freshman reading class explored the use of
persuasive language in hotel reviews and then experimented with the language by
converting a neutral descriptive paragraph of their home into an alluring bed andbreakfast advertisement. Audience members left the workshop with the sample
lesson handouts and ideas on how to design their own materials.

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper reports on the workshop I conducted at the Cambodia TESOL
conference (CAMTESOL) in February, 2013. In the workshop, I briefly introduced theconcept of multiliteracies and then shared a set of materials I designed as part of a unit onreviews and advertisements in the International Communications Department’s Reading& Writing course.	  

3	  Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  2. BACKGROUND

Since the start of the English classes in the International Communications department,
reading and writing courses were held separately. Textbooks were used in both classes,
and the main goals of the class were on reading and writing as cognitive skills andstrategies. All contents were of an academic genre. Readings were essay style withcomprehension questions and writing assignments were themed paragraphs and a finalessay. Although it goes without saying that there is a cognitive aspect to reading andwriting, Kern (2000) demonstrated that there are also sociocultural and linguistic
elements that are often unintentionally ignored in a skills based approach.
In the academic year 2012, ELI teachers in the BEPP IC research group, piloted
joint Reading Writing classes in the IC curriculum. Textbooks were replaced with inhouse made materials and the main focus became multiliteracies. This new curriculum
was inspired specifically by work described in Byrnes et al (2006) where learners are
involved in reading, writing and close textual analysis of a variety of discourses. Both
primary and secondary discourse types (see, e.g. Gee, 1998, 2002) were incorporated into
the curriculum to provide teaching materials that emphasize how “interactional patterns”
make up the core component of language use. The distinction between primary andsecondary discourse types can be conceptualized as “beginning with the oral language
use of familiar interactions and gradually moving into public, institutional, andprofessional settings.” (Byrnes et al, 2006, p. 90). Based on this distinction, topical units
were designed in sequence to take learners through a range of discourse types withrelated focus on how each text type represents different interactional patterns. The	  4	  Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  sequence began with primary discourse through emails and personal narratives and wasfollowed by blurred, or literary discourse, which was covered by 3rd person narratives
and folk tales. Finally, the sequence shifted to secondary discourses of public life withinstructions and procedures, news articles, reviews and advertisements, and lastly, theacademic essay. The aim of these new materials was to show students the different
written genres, make them explicitly aware of the audience and purpose each text waswritten for, and draw their attention to the unique organization, vocabulary, and style thateach genre is written in. Students would finish each unit with a written assignment toproduce their own sample from that genre.
The materials I was responsible for were part of a section of a larger Unit on
Reviews. The topic I chose was hotel advertisements and customer reviews. The
authentic images and text on the handouts were taken from an accommodation booking
website. The goals of these specific materials were twofold: one goal, which was applied
to all the multiliteracies materials in the curriculum, was to familiarize students with theorganization and formulaic language used in accommodation advertisements; anadditional goal unique to these materials was to help students read between the lines of an
accommodation advertisement and reviews and to recognize possible euphemisms. For
example, a hotel advertising their rooms as ‘cozy’ may actually be trying to candy coat
the fact that the rooms are small; ‘traditional’ can some times be used as a euphemism forold. The idea behind the second goal was to empower learners to make sound choices bytraining them to read between the lines in a foreign language and possibly even become
more aware of such tricky usages of words in their native language.
Before the materials packet was started, students were asked to write a descriptive	  5	  Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  paragraph of their family home, including it’s outside appearance, location, surroundingarea, and things inside the house. I collected these paragraphs before distributing thematerials packet and I held onto the paragraphs until the end of the unit, when they wereused for the Unit writing assignment (to be explained in further detail later). As a warmup to the topic, the students talked about their travel experience, favorite places to stay,
and what features are most important to them when deciding where to stay whentraveling. Then the students looked at a page in the packet that contained only photos of
the ryokan that the students would later read about. For example, one photo was the frontof the building, another was the bathroom; another was of the bedroom. They had towrite a few words that came to mind when they saw each photo and then predict whatkind of place they’d be staying at.
After producing language to describe their own first impressions of the ryokan,
based on the photos, students turned the page and read the accommodation advertisement.
We briefly ran through a series of questions about the text that are repeated in each unit,
based on Halliday’s (1978) view of language as a social semiotic: what is this text, whowrote the text, what is the purpose of the text, who was it written for? After answers tothese questions were shared, students then compared their first impressions of the text
with the description of the ryokan written by the owner. The purpose of this part of thelesson was to have students notice discrepancies between how they would describe theryokan and how the owner described it. They then tried to find specific polite
euphemisms in the text that could match up with some of their own more negativedescriptions of the ryokan. The class ended with the students looking at a real review of
the ryokan they had read about to see natural examples of critical language.	  

6	  Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  The focus of the next day was on the organization and content of theadvertisement. For example, students were asked to identify the topic of each paragraphin the advertisement: a site-seeing paragraph, location paragraph, description of therooms, and services provided. Formulaic expressions such as ‘each room is equippedwith’, ‘facilities include’, visiting this restaurant is a must’, had also been boldened in thetext and students were asked to fill out a chart where they rewrote the formulaic
expressions in neutral everyday English. For homework, students had to browse thewebsite that the original text came from, and choose another hotel that looked interesting
to stay at. They had to print the information page and bring it to the next class.
On day three, students got into groups of 3-4 and were given a hypotheticalsituation. A foreign friend was coming to visit and they had to plan a trip. As a group,
they had to share the information about the hotel they had researched for homework.
They had to compare and contrast the pros and cons of each hotel and then come to aunanimous agreement about which hotel to stay at. The purpose of this activity was toget students to see the repeating formulaic language used in multiple samples of the hotel
advertisement genre, as well as give them the chance to recycle the new vocabulary
words they had learned.
On the final class day using the materials packet, I returned the description
paragraphs that students had written prior to studying the materials. Students were thengiven the task to give their paragraph a makeover. They had to change it into apersuasive advertisement; they would imagine they were converting their home into a bed
and breakfast. I gave students a graphic organizer to help divide their information into
the different parts of a hotel advertisement: a site-seeing paragraph, location paragraph,	  7	  Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  description of the rooms, and services provided. After revisions, the students’ final
products were posted on the class Edmodo site.

3. DISCUSSION

In this section I will discuss the parts of the activity that students found easy, as well as
those that they found challenging. I listed these problems in my workshop and had theaudience brainstorm solutions or changes to the materials that could eliminate theproblems.
The students had no troubles with the initial descriptive paragraph homeworkassignment in terms of language and style. However, surprisingly, I took for granted thatstudents knew a lot about their local neighborhoods. This was not true in some cases andthose students had to do some extra research in order to complete the assignment. Thestudents also had plenty of vocabulary to describe the photos of the ryokan and how theyfelt about it.
The section of the material that was most challenging to students, and perhaps not
fully successful, was the ‘reading between the lines’ euphemism portion. They
understood the concept of euphemism because they had been given a previous
assignment where they had to think of some in Japanese. However, the main issue may
have been unfamiliarity with the vocabulary used in the text. Many of the euphemistic
words were new to the students. They hadn’t been exposed to certain vocabulary words
in natural contexts often enough to understand which were more frequent, which werebeing used more creatively, and which had negative nuances. In retrospect, this kind oflesson would have to be repeated with multiple samples of text before the students are	  8	  Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  able to read between the lines without the teacher explicitly drawing their attention to thelanguage.
With the exception of the euphemism portion mentioned above, the majority ofthe students performed well on the materials as assessed by their work on the handouts
and the final unit writing project. The easiest task for the students was to identify thewriter, audience, and purpose of the text. This is most likely due to the fact that thesesame questions are repeated in each unit with each new genre. In addition, it’s notdifficult to answer these questions even in a second language, but students simply needed
to know that they should think about the answers to these questions, in order to makeconnects between the purpose of the text and the formulaic language used for the genre.
One issue some students did have, was in finding formulaic language unassistedby the teacher. Students could easy understand that boldened words were formulaic, andit was easy to rewrite them in more commonly used expressions. For example,‘amenities include toothbrush and towel” could be rewritten as “we’ll give you atoothbrush and a towel’. However, there were additional formulaic expressions that I had
intentionally not boldened, and most students did not notice them. Looking back on thelesson, I realized it would have been much better to provide students with multiple
examples of hotel advertisements on the very first day, so they could scan through all theexamples for repeated phrases. When teaching this lesson again in the next academicyear, I would try this new idea to see if students would become capable of discoveringformulaic language without the explicit referencing from the teacher.
A final issue the students faced was that some of them did not reproduce the	  9	  Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  formulaic language in their personal hotel advertisements for the unit project. I
questioned them about this during individual meetings about their first draft. The reasons
they gave for not using the language were varied. Some students didn’t realize it wasnecessary, other students thought they shouldn’t because it would be considered‘plagiarism’ and other students explained they weren’t sure how to use the expressions
correctly. For example, one student asked about when to use ‘facilities’ and when to use‘amenities’. A possible solution to the first two problems would again involve theteacher in being more explicit. Perhaps saying to the students, “these are special words
used in all hotel advertisements and you must use them when you write your own.” Inaddition, in the context of ESL, it may be necessary for the teacher to tell students when
they are supposed to copy exact language phrases and when it is forbidden. Otherwise,
they are given mixed signals about plagiarism in a second language. The final issue of
how to use specific words and phrases could be addressed by providing multiple samples

and also scaffolding the material in more detail. The preparation handout for the final
project , could include a section on which phrases should be used in each of the specificcontent paragraphs. For example, focus questions could be paired with appropriate
phrases: “What items will you provide so the customer does not have to bring their own?”(Amenities include...). Overall, it seems I needed to give more explicit instruction andinclude more structured steps in the materials.	  

10	  Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  4. CONCLUSION

Teaching materials based on a multiliteracies approach was a new experience for me.
Similar to when I first started teaching grammar, I realized that, before, I had not been
consciously aware of formulaic language and how different words and patterns are usedin different genres of texts. I had to rediscover my own language in a new way in orderto design materials to efficiently teach these patterns to second language learners. Not
surprisingly, some of my initial attempts were not completely successful because I was
not explicit enough with drawing students’ attention to language patterns. The gave
advice to teachers in training at the CAMTESOL workshop based on my own successes
and failures in designing materials for the pilot of the Reading & Writing course. I
would advise any teacher who plans to design multiliteracies material for their class to do
the following: Make sure there is enough structural activities in the handouts to properly
scaffold the learning process, make the language focus explicit by boldening vocabularyphrases students need to learn and have them rewrite the new phrases in their own words,
paragraph content graphic organizers, and above all, give students multiple samples fromthe same genre so they can recognize repeated patterns. Although I do believe this adviceis helpful, I also recognize that I am still a novice at materials design for multiliteracies
and my advice is therefore not definitive. I chose to present these materials atCAMTESOL 2013 because the theme was Language and Empowerment. If
multiliteracies training materials are designed properly, students should become able torecognize different genres of text and the formulaic language that comes with it, as well
as read between the lines to find hidden or additional intended meaning. This is a way to	  11	  Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research	  Vol.	  2	  No.	  1.	  February	  2014,	  3	  -­‐	  12	  	  make them empowered language users in an increasingly multilingual world.

5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank RILS&LE for assistance with the funding to present this workshop
at the 2013 CAMTESOL conference in Phnom Penh.

6. REFERENCES
Byrnes, H., Crane, C., Maxim, H. H., & Sprang, K. A. (2006). Taking text to task: Issues
and choices in curriculum construction. ITL, 152, 85.
Gee, J. P. (1998). What is literacy? In V. Zamel, & R. Spack (Eds.). Negotiating
academic literacies: Teaching and learning across languages and cultures (pp.
51-59). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gee, J. P. (2002). Literacies, identities, and discourses. In M. J. Schleppegrell, & M.
Cecilia Colombi (Eds.). Developing advanced literacy in first and second
languages: Meaning with power (pp. 159-175). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation ofLanguage and Meaning. London: Arnold.
Kern, R. (2000). Literacy and Language Teaching. New York: Oxford.	  

12