This course will (1) introduce students to different approaches to the study of advertisements, including semiotics, grammar of visual design, discourse analysis and multimodality; (2) introduce students to the whole range of communicative features in advertisements and commercials, including text (linguistic and paralinguistic features), image, composition, colour, and sound, and to illustrate how and what they communicate; and (3) allow students to apply their knowledge of advertising to analyses of different types of advertisements and commercials.