Lessons > Word Play

This lesson is designed around one of the posters for an ad campaign by the French National Railway Company SNCF (Société nationale des chemins de fer français). This ad plays on the sounds of the French language and the imagery of the French countryside by comparing it humorously to the sounds of English and the expected imagery of global metropolises. Through humor, this artifact leads the learners to wonder about the relationship between urban and rural cultures/perspectives in France? Does this type of power relationship exist between their native urban and rural cultures? Does it surface in specific cultural practices?

Additionally, students will reflect on advertising strategies in the target culture, while considering the different types of negation in French and their uses.

The final task is designed as a team effort. Student will script and design their own parody of a commercial promoting their college town by reinvesting the semiotic codes they noticed in the various documents under study.

This lesson can easily be implemented in most textbook-based curricula, as these typically include a thematic unit of tourism and traveling, although they rarely, if ever, discuss the issue of centralization and rural desertification.

Texts, Genres & Practices

• Reading, watching, listening and interpreting the languaculture behind satirical texts (billboards, commercials, comedy sketches)
• Reading and analyzing a short touristic text on Auvergne (blog)
• Writing/Designing a script for a satirical commercial promoting a college town
• Presenting (through promoting) a tourist destination

Cultural Knowledge & Perspectives

• Analyze French examples of satirical discourse.
• Conceive advertising as a satirical tool
• Reflect on the on the part of humor that is culture specific.
• Compare French advertising with equivalents in the learners’ native culture
• Discover historical and cultural aspects of French demographics and geography

Language Use & Language Play

• Word play / Sound play: Subversion of the French phonetic inventory to create rural metropolises.
• Visual play: subversion of rural semiotics (reinterpreting the visual identity of the French countryside).
• Culture play: subversion of the theme of rural exodus.
• Genre play / Perspective play: subversion of the advertising genre by adopting a negative perspective.
• Language Skills: viewing, reading, listening, writing, speaking, cultural understanding