ISSN 1989 – 9572

DOI: 10.47750/jett.2021.12.02.011

The advantages of using TED talks materials in ESL

classrooms
Shelestova Tatyana1

Kalizhanova Anna1,2

Romanyuk Sevara1

Zhuman Altynay3

Journal for Educators, Teachers and Trainers, Vol. 12 (2)

https://jett.labosfor.com/

Date of reception: 15 Dec 2020

Date of revision: 12 March 2021

Date of acceptance: 18 June 2021

Shelestova Tatyana, Kalizhanova Anna, Romanyuk Sevara, Zhuman Altynay. (2021). The advantages of
using TED talks materials in ESL classrooms. Journal for Educators, Teachers and Trainers, Vol. 12(2). 81 – 87.

1
Department of Theory and Practice of Translation of Karaganda State University named after E.A. Buketov
2
Department of Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication of the Private Institution, Bolashaq
Academy
3
Department of the Theory and Practice of Foreign Language Training of Karaganda State University named
after E.A. Buketov

Journal for Educators, Teachers and Trainers JETT, Vol. 12 (2); ISSN: 1989-9572 81
 Journal for Educators, Teachers and Trainers, Vol. 12 (2)
ISSN 1989 – 9572
https://jett.labosfor.com/
The advantages of using TED talks materials in ESL classrooms
Shelestova Tatyana1, Kalizhanova Anna1,2*, Romanyuk Sevara1, Zhuman Altynay3
1
Department of Theory and Practice of Translation of Karaganda State University named after E.A. Buketov
2
Department of Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication of the Private Institution, Bolashaq
Academy
3
Department of the Theory and Practice of Foreign Language Training of Karaganda State University named
after E.A. Buketov
*Corresponding Author
Email ID: [email protected]

АBSTRACT
This article presents TED Talks materials to teach English in secondary and higher educational
institutions. The authors describe such advantages of TED Talks materials as their authenticity,
availability, variety, utility, user-friendly usability of the website with the materials, and the
existence of scripts for each video. The authors prove that TED Talks materials are effective for
developing students’ speaking skills and extending their vocabulary by describing the experience
of conducting English classes using TED Talks materials during the professional-pedagogical
practice, the results of which are also given in this article. After 34 English lessons with the use of
TED Talks materials within the framework of the elective course «English for Academic Purposes»
for 8-11 grade pupils, the participants of the classes demonstrated better public speaking skills and
could speak on different topics for more than 10 minutes without any visual aids.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license.

Keywords: Authentic materials, TED talks materials, Educational activities, Listening skills,
Speaking skills.

INTRODUCTION
For developing and sustaining healthy relationships, good communication is important. When you give your
presentation, it is how to keep the audience interested. It's a way of communicating with others more authentically.
The secret to solving so many of our problems is always good communication, and yet, it's not always easy. The
development of English language communicative competence requires using new approaches and advanced
technologies nowadays (Coffin et al., 2005; Volchkova, 2018; Chang & Huang, 2015; Hadi, 2018; Evtyugina, 2020;
Jabbarova, 2020; Suyunovna, 2020; Yaroslavova, 2020). Various authentic materials play a huge role in the
development of English speaking and listening skills for students because they provide a great number of sources
for teaching schoolchildren English (Losada et al., 2017). Ted Talks satisfy the characteristics of authentic audio-
visual materials (Gilmore, 2007); so, further, we are going to consider the peculiarities of using them while teaching
English.
One of the biggest advantages of authentic materials is that they were originally created for native speakers
(Bajrami & Ismaili, 2016). That is, students who study English using such authentic videos will learn how to decode
the rapid speech of natives and their fluent pronunciation of words (Sugito et al., 2017; Norhailawati et al., 2019).
Authentic videos provide «the real language,» which is culturally relevant and contextually rich (Spelleri, 2002).
Such videos can be used in the classroom as a way of presenting the content and initiating discussions; they can
also be employed as an illustration for a particular topic, content, or situation, as well as for self-study (Bajrami &
Ismaili, 2016). Authentic videos can also motivate students to learn the English language (Azimova, 2019).
Christopher and Ho (Christopher & Ho, 1996) explain why learning English with the use of videos is much more
interesting for students than other types of authentic materials: firstly, students can enjoy music and customization
elements; secondly, videos provide topics and ideas for discussion. Authentic video materials develop speaking
and listening skills through the use of common themes, language functions, and grammar presented in the video
(Ishihara & Chi, 2004).
Such authentic materials include videos from the website www.TED.com that can engage modern students in
forming their speaking skills with pleasure by assisting in «making one think,» allowing students to «discuss
complex topics,» enabling «learning to express one’s arguments» and «working independently, in one’s rhythm»
(Sorokina, 2020; Nursafira, 2020; Handayani, 2020). The availability of TED Talks lectures allows teachers to conduct

Journal for Educators, Teachers and Trainers JETT, Vol. 12 (2); ISSN: 1989-9572 82
various kinds of educational activities with their students. Such activities include finding specific terms, synonyms
for certain words, as well as finding more accessible contextual information on the topic or subject of a
conversation. Ted Talks materials are widely used by English teachers worldwide. For example, in Japan, teaching
staff use TED Talks to promote the development of autonomous listening strategies, the development of listening
fluency, vocabulary learning, and extensive conversational practice through discussions, thanks to a variety of
topics related to global issues that can serve as a great start to a dispute (Hadi, 2018).
Although TED talks are a popular kind of infotainment, any teacher can use them in the teaching process, which
contributes to the development of a number of competencies, such as value-sense, general cultural, information,
communication, personal self-improvement competencies, etc. (Volchkova, 2018). Moreover, they have been found
to be effective in not only developing listening skills but also in providing the material that inspires both teachers
and students and encouraging students to engage in discussion, research, and lifelong learning (Chang & Huang,
2015).
The relevance of this article lies in the significant distribution of the materials in question as an educational tool
all over the world, which requires the development of guidelines for their usage in order to reach high scores in
teaching English.
The novelty of the research lies in an attempt to offer an algorithmized methodological description of the usage
of TED Talks materials in the educational process, which can be used by teachers for conducting speaking classes
at secondary and higher educational institutions.
The results of this research can be applied to further grant projects regarding the development of both teachers’
and students’ public speaking skills.
The lexical composition of TED Talks lectures is very rich in all sorts of terms, idioms, phraseological units, as
well as simple everyday phrases that can be useful when learning English. Before choosing a video, the teacher
should make sure that its lexical composition corresponds to the level of language abilities of his students. The
analysis of the lexical composition of TED Talks lectures will help the English teacher in the preparation of the
lesson to identify the degree of difficulties students can encounter. TED Talks are useful for developing lessons
of English for academic purposes (Coffin et al., 2005; Perouse-Harvey, 2020; Murotova et al., 2020). Moreover, TED
Talks lectures are popular among teachers and learners of English as a second foreign language (ESL)
(Nurmukhamedov, 2017). It is quite easy to perform lexical analysis of TED Talks videos. The website
www.TED.com has a very convenient feature: under each video, there are scripts in English and in several other
languages. Videos, scripts, and transcription to them are placed in a convenient location, which helps to find them
easily. Consequently, these aspects of the web page create a more enjoyable language learning experience for
those watching TED videos (Park & Cha, 2013).
A very serious approach to the development of a lesson using TED Talks lectures is required. Since a competently
designed system of tasks aims at the development of speech competencies, and this fact, in turn, contributes to the
formation and maintenance of communicative motivation in learning a foreign language. We offer our version of
the use of TED Talks materials in English lessons for upper secondary school.

Aim of the article

The article is aimed at showing ESL teachers a new approach to teaching English that can really improve the
students’ readiness for unprepared spontaneous speech (Wolfe, 2015; Takaesu, 2017). Some teachers have already
used TED Talks materials, while others have just heard about them. However, ESL school teachers in Kazakhstan
do not consider TED Talks as the basic or even supplementary means for teaching English because the website’s
materials are not included in the official instructional and methodological letters, based on which all instructors
design their lesson plans («Instructional and methodological letters»). In this regard, we want to show that using
TED Talks materials is worth trying by creating a series of English classes with the application of TED Talks
videos for 8-11 grade learners.

RESEARCH METHOD
The introduction of TED Talks materials into English classes as an educational tool started with the designing an
elective course «English for Academic purposes» for 7–11 grades estimated at 34 academic hours and coordinated
with the Karaganda City Department of Education. 14 students (6 – from the 7th grade; 4 – from the 8th grade; 2
– from the 9th grade, and 2 – from the 10th grade) attended one class per week within six months of studying at
school. In the beginning, the students of 7th and 8th grades were able to understand the gist of the video, could
express their opinion by using such short phrases as «I agree with the speaker,» «I liked the topic of the video,»
etc. In other words, most of those students could not give the full answer to a question. The students of the 9th
and 10th grades were more active at the lessons due to wider background knowledge. However, their answers
were not full and varied either. The pupils’ language skills were measured in accordance with the CEFR scale –
most of them had A2 level (Yao, 2020; Forti et al., 2020; Fleckenstein et al., 2020). Hereinafter we describe the structure
of the lesson, which can be used as an example, and, in conclusion, we will show how students’ language skills
have changed according to CEFR (North, 2014; Hulstijn, 2007; Sidhu et al., 2018).

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At the beginning of the course, we asked the school students if they have heard about TED Talks lectures, whether
they are interested in learning English with the use of such materials, and what their expectations from the program
are. The questionnaire results showed that 80% of the respondents have known of the video lectures TED Talks
before but never used them while studying English. 90% of the school students wanted to improve their speaking
skills and vocabulary by the end of the course. We also asked the learners what topics they would prefer to
consider. The answers to this question varied a lot. However, such themes as technologies, mass media, social
media, and advertisement dominated; so, we chose some videos about it from www.TED.com and designed the
lessons to work on the chosen topics.
We conducted ten face-to-face English classes within the framework of the designed course «English for
Academic Purposes.» Each of our face-to-face lessons started with a greeting and questions that could help to set
students up for work as well as language activities, such as: «How are you?», «How was your weekend?», «Did
you enjoy your weekend?», «Do you like the weather today?» etc. The next step involved watching a video of the
TED Talks lecture. Let's take a lecture by chemist Ilona Stengel on «The Role of Human Emotions in Science and
Research» (Stengel). In this video, Ilona Stengel told the audience how emotions and feelings assisted the speaker
and her colleagues in making a breakthrough in the study, on which they had been working for a long time. The
video material was selected in accordance with the calendar thematic planning, which allows students to
consolidate the themes already covered, as well as learn something new and consider the topic from a different
angle. The pupils understood what the video was about and proved this by taking an active part in the discussion
of this lecture.
It is crucial that video viewing should consist of pre-demonstration, demonstration, and post-demonstration stages.
At the pre-demonstration stage, students needed to guess what the video is about by its name. They also needed
to answer questions related to the topic of the video, such as «What is your attitude to science?», «What is your
favorite science subject and why?» etc. Students could take turns to answer the questions to the teacher; they could
also ask each other questions related to this topic, thus performing group work and extending their speaking time.
Questions are an important step, as they encourage students to enter into a discussion with a teacher or among
themselves, and this, in turn, will help them not be distracted from work and will keep them focused and motivated.
The demonstration phase involved watching a TED Talks lecture with subtitles for students to understand the
speaker's quick speech better. This allowed students to write out new words and subsequently ask the teacher
about their meaning. Nevertheless, if there was enough time, the teacher could first play the video without subtitles
and see how many students understood the main idea. And only the second time the video may be then shown
with subtitles.
After watching the video, the teacher asked the students about the main idea that the speaker was trying to express
to clarify how well they comprehended the speech of the native speaker and whether they were able to get the gist
from a large amount of information.
At the next stage, students were divided into groups, and each group was given a different part of the script; so,
all groups had different texts where words from the speech had been omitted and needed to be inserted by listening
to the speech carefully again and again. Such open cloze tasks made the students learn to decode and recognize
individual words in the speech of a native English speaker. It was also a task aimed at checking their attentiveness
and listening for details.
After all, groups completed the task, students from each group were asked to read the passage given to them
already with the filled-in gaps. Then, the teacher displayed on the screen the text with the right words inserted,
and the students had to check the spelling of the words and correct their mistakes.
At the post-demonstration stage, unfamiliar words and phrases that occurred in the speech were analyzed with the
help of a presentation prepared for this purpose. The teacher might complicate the task a little and make the
analysis of new words more interesting by asking students to guess the meaning of a word in the context of a
sentence taken from a TED Talks lecture script. Students did not have to translate these words into their native
language – instead, they were asked to explain their meaning in English. If none of the students gave the correct
answer, the meaning of the word was displayed on the screen, and the students needed to make a sentence with it.
Making sentences with these words and phrases helped students to remember them and use them in a speech in
the later dispute.
At the end of the class, students were engaged in the discussion. Such questions as «Do you agree with the
speaker?», «Do you prefer to suppress or to show your emotions?» «Have you ever faced a similar situation as
the speaker has?» enabled to do this. Students should learn to speak, so this stage was mandatory. In addition, a
few minutes at the end of the lesson were allocated for reflection. During such a lesson, students developed
listening and speaking skills. Moreover, they improved their team-building skills and managed to replenish their
vocabulary.
Unfortunately, the global pandemic situation intervened in our plans, and we had to stop conducting our face-to-
face classes. Instead, we started to have online ESL lessons, but not all participants could join our classes on the
Zoom platform. However, we were able to teach four online classes, whose structure did not differ from the face-
to-face ones a lot. For example, for one of our online lessons, we chose the video «Social Media and the End of

Journal for Educators, Teachers and Trainers JETT, Vol. 12 (2); ISSN: 1989-9572 84
Gender» by Johanna Blakley, the Deputy Director of the Norman Lear Center. The choice of the video was
justified by the contemporary youth’s growing attention to various social media, especially during the period of
their isolation. While designing the lesson, we analyzed different types of technologies and decided to gather all
lesson stages in one presentation – instructional media, created with the help of one of the most well-known
multimedia creation tools, PowerPoint. The lesson was aimed at developing the pupils’’ speaking and writing
skills by watching the lecture and doing pre-, while-, and post-watching tasks. The warm-up phase involved the
following issues such as «Do you often use social media?» «When did you first use social media?» «What is the
best thing about social media?» «Who uses social media most in your family?» These problems helped to break
the deadlock and involve learners in further work.
To set the background of the lesson, we showed the photo of the speaker and the title «Social Media and the End
of Gender» so that our learners can predict the meaning of the video. We facilitated further observation and tasks
by teaching new words in advance. For this purpose, we created an interactive activity with the help of an
instrument called Visme.
The while-watching phase involved two activities. When watching the video for the first time, our students
answered such questions as «What is the main idea of the speech?» «Do you agree with the speaker?» «What is
your attitude towards this lecture?» For the second time, they needed to arrange the information from the video in
the correct order with the help of another instructional interactive, created in the same tool Visme.
The post-watching phase involved data consolidation with the help of an interactive quiz, created in the tool called
Genial.ly. We also asked our learners to write a short review (at least seven sentences) on the video and thereby
practiced their writing skills. Students should learn to write, so this stage is mandatory.
In addition, a few minutes at the end of the lesson were allocated for reflection, during which the students answered
if they liked the lesson, what the most useful information for them was, what part of the lesson was the most
interesting.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Altogether we conducted fifteen classes and interviewed our school students again. The questionnaire consisted
of 7 questions and showed the following results:
1) The course helped 100% of attendees to develop their speaking skills and 20% – to overcome the fear of
speaking. By our evaluation, most of the students in the group who had had A2 level of speaking skills, after the
completion of the course were able to speak at the level B1 confidently, giving reasons and explanations. We
could also observe the development of listening skills as, with time, pupils started to understand videos better,
which was obvious in the post-watching discussion.
2) 60% of students became more positive about TED Talks lectures after the course, although 40% knew the
materials before.
3) 60% of students enjoyed the discussion of the topics, 20% liked the group work, and 20% were pleased with
all activities.
4) 70% of students found our course complete enough, but 30% would add such topics as History of English,
English accents, and slang to the course.
However, despite interesting online classes, the majority of our participants agreed that face-to-face lessons are
better anyway; so, we can declare that the role of the teacher and his/her presence in the life of his/her learners is
crucial.

CONCLUSION
As a result, an ordinary English lesson became more interactive by involving TED Talks materials in the
educational process. It was confirmed in practice that students are highly enthusiastic about taking part in such a
lesson. However, for achieving real improvements, it is necessary to follow the three stages described in the
article, actively involve pupils in the discussion, impelling them to use new words from the scripts, and combine
group work with individual speaking. TED Talks materials are very effective in teaching English, thanks to the
compelling presentation of material by the speakers, their use of authentic speech, the ability to switch on subtitles
and see scripts for each video. So, they can be used as a tool to design English lessons that will be informative
and entertaining, thus inducing the students to pro-actively participate in the learning process.

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