A Study of the Influences of Language Message in the TV advertisements on the Adolescent's Argumental Ability

Yi, Man Hwi (Department of Education The Graduate School Yonsei University)

TV advertisements have become an important economic establishment in the capitalism. The previous studies show us that the TV advertisements, which are used as a means to boost the sales of products, have not only an economical effect but an educational effect as well. The educational effect the TV advertisements on the physically, emotionally immature adolescents is especially clear. The TV ads of the modern society, that is becoming a kind of an educational environment.

From this point of view, this study puts emphasis on the educational capability of the TV Advertisements. The purpose of this study is to find out the influence of language message used in TV advertisements on adolescents, so we can find out the educational effect of the mass media.

To accomplish this purpose, in chapter 2 the theories that needed to construct the analyzing tools were studied: Toulmin's argument model, Rottenberg's argument model, and recognition test for advertisement.

The analyzing tools, analyzing time, analyzing objects and data analysis methods are shown in chapter 3. The analysis of TV advertisements was based on 208 TV advertisements that were shown on August 28th through September 4th. 208 TV advertisements were divided into argumental TV advertisements and non-argumental TV advertisements by the frequency and percentage.

To analyze the influence of TV advertisements, recognition test papers were given to 154 students of 3 middle schools in Seoul. The 154 data were analyzed by one-way ANOVA and multiple regression analysis.

The findings of this study are summarized as follow.

1. Analyzing the 208 TV advertisements, the 9.3 Percent of TV advertisements for adolescent, the 37.6 percent of TV advertisements not for adolescent and the 9.3 percent of whole TV advertisements were categorized as argumental TV advertisements.

2. To examine the difference of recognition between adolescent groups that had ability of argument and that had not, one-way ANOVA was done. The results showed that there was a significant difference between two groups.

3. In this study, other from the recognition of TV advertisements school grades (language grades), the argument of reading books and the degree of watching TV were assumed as independent variables. In order to get the basic information for multiple regression analysis the correlation analysis was done. The result showed that there were positive correlation between the amount of reading books and the ability to argue and between language grades and the ability to argue.

4. To analyze the degree of TV advertisement influence on adolescent's argumental ability, multiple regression analysis was done. It tuned out, that language grades operated positively for adolescent's argumental ability. While watching TV advertisements operated negatively. But, looking at the degree of the effect, watching TV advertisement had a greater influence rather than language grades.

Key words: Argumental ability. Argumental TV advertisements. Recognition tests. Language message.