Netvertising and ESP: genre-based analysis of target advertisements and its application in the Business English classroom

There is a new trend in genre-analysis studies which is starting to pay attention to the study of technology for academic and teaching purposes. Different authors have re-defined genre, adding to the concept not just form or structure, but also content, situation, context and communicative purposes. The present analysis is a detailed study on how new Internet genres can play an important role in the Business English classroom. We have studied a corpus of 40 first page target ads, of which 20 introduced products, whereas the other 20 were created in order to offer information about different types of services. We have analysed sub-generic similarities and differences considering five different aspects: objectives, register, language, content units and the author’s presence in the resulting text. Conclusions are drawn from this study, emphasising how this type of ads can be used in the Business English classroom.