English Language Teaching With TED Talks

by Tara Arntsen

While TED has been around since 1984, it seems that TED Talks have gained notoriety and
worldwide recognition in just the past several years with smaller TEDx conferences popping
up around the globe. With more than 2,000 talks available for free online and the tagline
"Ideas worth spreading," it is no wonder that educators have sought to use these high-quality
materials in their lessons. Even educational publishers, like Cengage, have gotten on the
bandwagon and started including TED Talks in their textbook series.

While incorporating new supplemental material such as TED Talks into your class may seem
daunting, it is well worth the effort. Here are some tips to help you choose appropriate talks
for your ELLs and scaffold them for the most effective student learning. I’ve also included
several excellent TED Talks to get you started.

Selection
Selecting an appropriate TED Talk from such a vast library is the initial challenge, and what
you ultimately choose will depend a lot on your students and objectives.

Choosing Content

I have found TED Talks in general to be fairly challenging from a language learning
standpoint. They are often fast paced, contain highly specialized vocabulary, and cover
complex topics. For these reasons, I often choose talks that complement units in our textbook
and either add to the information already covered or present a contrasting view. If you would
like to choose a talk on an entirely new topic, it is important to remember that topics that are
familiar to students will be easier for them to comprehend than completely new ones. As
engaging as many talks about obscure topics are, these are going to present quite a challenge
for language learners, especially at the lower levels.

Determining Language Level

Speaking of level, determining whether or not a particular TED Talk would suit my students’
language level was one of the biggest challenges I had. Listening to the material myself was a
fine starting point. There was a lot of guess work initially and some talks certainly worked
better than others, but I have recently resorted to putting the transcript through an online
analyzer. While reading and listening are entirely different, using free Lexile level or
readability analyzers has been very helpful. Even if not 100% accurate, using the same
analyzer on different talks can help determine how they compare to one another.

As obvious as it is, feedback from students has made clear to me that certain talks have been
easier to comprehend than others due to the materials the speakers use during the talk. When
watching TED Talks, keep an eye out for those that make use of detailed slides, which will
aid comprehension.

Preteaching Vocabulary

I recently started creating academic listening and speaking units without a textbook and
found an interesting website, lextutor, while looking for a way to pull out vocabulary words.

TED Talks in ELT 1 TESOL Connections: September 2016

The site itself is nothing special to look at, but just paste in the material and click submit to
have the words sorted into various categories, which can help you identify the level of the
talk as well as which vocabulary words to pull out. For example, an analysis of one TED Talk
revealed that affect and design were two words on the Academic Word List (AWL) that
occurred very frequently while acoustics and architects, which are off-list words, also
repeated and would likely need to be pretaught for students to grasp the full meaning of the
lecture.

Duration of the Talk

Duration will also play a factor in the selection process. Because the material is often
challenging and students will likely have to listen to the material several times, I often stick
to the talks that are less than 6 minutes, which is a duration option in the TED Talks search
function. For more advanced students, longer talks may be more suitable. For lower level
students, you may want to pull out 1- to 2-minute clips to work with, instead.

Scaffolding
Once you have selected a TED Talk for your class, you will likely set about creating
activities around the content that will scaffold student learning. While I imagine most
educators use TED Talks in their video form, the transcripts could certainly be adapted and
used for reading practice, or talks could be incorporated into a reading class as an extension
of a unit on the same theme. As I mentioned already, choosing talks related to textbook
content is one of the easiest things to do as you are likely to already have related activities at
your disposal. Depending on the focus of your class, there are different pre-, during-, and
posttalk activities you could do. Here are some to consider.

Activities: Before the Talk

Whether for reading or listening, the focus of activities before the talk will likely be on
activating prior knowledge and vocabulary development. To get students interested in and
talking about the topic, choose some images, general questions, or perhaps a survey. Students
can work with these materials in the classroom or at home. Vocabulary activities can mirror
the patterns students are used to. At the lower levels, I do matching activities in class and
create a Quizlet study set for students to use, while at the higher levels, students have more
ownership over their study materials.

Activities: During the Talk

While students are listening to the TED Talk or reading the transcript, activities can focus on
note-taking with various levels of support depending on student level. Because I use TED
Talks in an intermediate-level listening and speaking class, I often provide gap fill notes or
blank outlines to get students started, whereas advanced-level students could just be asked to
take notes on their own without that framework. Similarly, readers could be asked to take
notes or create an outline pulling out the main ideas and details, facts and opinions, and more.
Comprehension questions assigned as homework can help focus students on key information
and provide you with feedback on what areas students need more support.

Activities: After the Talk

TED Talks in ELT 2 TESOL Connections: September 2016

Once students have processed the information in the talk, there is a wide array of
postlistening or -reading activities to choose from, and because this is the production stage of
learning, I always find it to be the most fun and interesting. Discussions around the topic can
be set up to be done orally in class or written in an online forum. Give lower level students
frames for agreeing, disagreeing, asking for clarification, paraphrasing, and other types of
responses you want to encourage and develop. Group or individual debates, presentations,
and reports can all extend the topic and serve as skill development or practice and even
assessment. Once the unit is complete, include the TED Talk material in whatever assessment
method you choose.

TED Talk Recommendations

If they happen to fit into your curriculum, I can definitely recommend a few TED Talks that I
have used. For a beginner listening and speaking class, Jay Walker's "The world's English
mania" and clips from Tom Wujec's "Build a tower, build a team" were both excellent
additions to units about English as a global language and team building in business,
respectively. For an intermediate listening and speaking class, I use Birke Baehr's "What's
wrong with our food system" to present an alternate view to the one in our textbook of
genetically modified food and also as a way to discuss what makes a good presentation. In
the same class, I have also used Julian Treasure's "Why architects need to use their ears" in a
unit on architecture, although it is somewhat difficult to listen to at times due to the examples
he uses. While putting together a unit on art, I found Ken Robinson's "Do schools kill
creativity?" but ended up only using the anecdote about the dancer, which starts around the
15-minute mark. Keep in mind that these are just a handful of the many amazing talks out
there, and if they do not work for you and your students, you can find one that will.

Conclusion
TED Talks are a fantastic resource for educators in any field and can be used as primary or
supplemental material in the ESL classroom. If you want to see what others have done with
TED Talks, look no further than TED Ed for "lessons worth sharing," where teachers have
posted lessons they have created around specific talks. Once you have selected and scaffolded
a particular talk for you students, I hope that you will post it for other educators to see as well.
For even more information about TED Talks, visit the TESOL Blog to see what Alexandra
Lowe (“TED Talks as Authentic Listening Materials: Turning Points and Near-Death
Experiences”) and I (“TED Talks for English Language Teaching”) have said about them in
the past.

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Tara Arntsen recently completed her master's degree in Teaching-TESOL at the University
of Southern California. She currently directs the Academic English and ESL Programs at
Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. She previously taught ESOL in China,
Japan, and Cambodia as well as online. Her primary interests are communicative teaching
methods and the use of technology in education.

TED Talks in ELT 3 TESOL Connections: September 2016