TED Talks and Extensive Listening

Ph Vivian

April 2018

In their paper, Renandya and Farrell (2010) have laid special emphasis on extensive listening in English language teaching (ELT). They claim that extensive listening students not only outperform the strategy-based students on the receptive measures, but also outscore the control students on the picture storytelling test. In this sense, extensive listening and the positive effects of employing TED Talks in developing listening skills would be the focus of this reflective discussion.

From the perspective foreign language teaching and learning, TED Talks offers a great source of authentic listening materials (Park and Cha, 2013). At the present time, there are more than 2,700 talks on the tremendous variety of topics available on the official website www.ted.com to be discovered. The talks are continuously updated in order to stress the topicality of the social current affairs so that the site is reasonably able to meet the learners’ interests.

In addition, TED.com provides a distinctive “interactive transcript” (Park and Cha, op.cit. p. 98) which substantially helps English learners watch and see the transcript at the same time. Brown, Waring, and Donkaewbua, (2008) when examining the effectiveness of holistic reading-while-listening approach assert that learners may be aware that a higher level of comprehension is approachable and doable. This greatly encourages them to move forward and pay more attention to invest time and effort in this skill.

As a teacher of English, I have witnessed how my students feel interested in and make enthusiastic response to TED Talks whenever I have some extra time to show them one. From my view, I do believe TED Talks would probably be one of the great sources to be exploited and used in improving students’ listening skills. Also, TED Talks deverses more careful study in specific contexts in uplifting students’ listening proficiency.

REFERENCES

[1]   Brown, R., Waring, R., & Donkaewbua, S. (2008). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading, reading-while-listening, and listening to stories. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20(2). 136-63.

[2]   Park, S-M. & Cha, K-W. (2013). Pre-service teachers’ perspectives on a blended listening course using TED Talks. Multimedia-Assisted Language Learning, 16(2), 93-116.

[3]   Renandya, W. A. & Farrell, T. S. C. (2010). ‘Teacher, the tape is too fast!’ Extensive listening in ELT. ELT Journal Volume, 65(1). 52-59.