ANALYSIS OF PROFESSIONAL JOB ADVERTS: A COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING APPROACH (Review Completed - Accepted)
Communicative language teaching takes cognizance of the fact that students should be made aware that sentences have a logical form as well as a practical or pragmatic function. However, teachers get little support from grammar books and are thus faced with a daunting task of finding suitable authentic material to supplement the information in the grammar books. Adverts are one of the best sources of authentic materials for language teaching as they portray a range of linguistic and stylistic features. This paper looks at the language of job adverts, with a special focus on how companies manipulate language to achieve their communicative purpose. The data for this study were adverts taken from www.jobs.ac.uk website. As this is a language awareness type of project, the data were analysed mostly qualitatively, looking at the structural organization of the ads and making a description of patterns of language use. Findings indicate that there was extensive use of attributive adjectives with connotations of superiority, success and dynamism. It was also observed that companies preferred to use a personal style typical of ordinary conversations. Hence, the use of first and second person pronouns featured prominently in the ads. The personal style, it can be argued, is a persuasive strategy employed to steer candidates into applying
Keywords: Adverts, Communicative Language Teaching