Integrating genre approach and TED talks to enhance students' presentation skills

Abstract:

TED talks, with its name “TED” standing for technology, entertainment and design, have outgrown the initial three themes to touch on various disciplines, including business, politics, science, and global issues such as climate change, terrorism, education, etc.

TED talks resemble traditional lectures in that both are for the purpose of spreading an idea in a hybrid form of spoken and written texts: the talks are delivered verbally with the written presentation of PowerPoints slides. However, TED talks differentiate from lectures in many aspects. The talks are limited to 18 minutes and subtitled with multi-language transcripts online for a global audience; the language is more colloquial; sometimes speakers use multimedia aids such as videos, music, dance, etc.

Being a unique form of “planned speech event” (G, 2012), TED talks have gained popularity as authentic language material in ESL classrooms. This research intends to adopt the genre analysis approach to deconstruct TED talks and explore the possible pedagogical implications for language teaching, especially in terms of students’ presentation skills. The purpose of this project can be summarized as:

1. To examine the linguistic and socio-cognitive features of TED Talks with a genre analysis approach;

2. To apply TED Talk analysis results in two pedagogical contexts: the self-access language learning activities and year one English classes.