Abstract

The production of meaning from visual messages has been largely uninvestigated in the Arab world, particularly in such visually intensive areas as advertising, even though the question is of tremendous importance to designers of advertising messages. The reason could be the difficulty of capturing visual meaning and the lack of structured research approaches to code and categorize information related to advertising.

This article investigates the practices used in billboards and store banners, and how the meanings of the images and texts in these advertisements are interpreted by university students in Jordan. A population of one-hundred senior English major students at university level were involved in this study. The data for this study consists of a representative sample of three billboards and store banners out of a population of twenty advertisements collected from major cities in Jordan. Each of these represents one or more discursive practices. The analysis consists of three stages: description, interpretation, and explanation. Three main practices have been identified: metaphoric representation, code- mixing, and defamiliarization.