TED.com is used in teaching EFL to enhance exposure to English, to promote authentic vocabulary and to develop multiple foreign language skills. For university students studying business as their major and English for professional communication as a part of their university curriculum, TED talks provide a cutting-edge business context, which aims to increase the learners’ English language proficiency, develop the learners’ professional competencies and expand their outlook by acquainting them with business practices from around the world. Through authentic models of effective communication, students build fluency to achieve academic and personal success. Business English with TED talks, an EFL resource book, is the result of the author’s approach to creating educational materials based on authentic and up to date video content. Using the example of ‘Business English with TED talks’, this paper describes criteria for selecting TED talks for different groups of students, the structure of a TED talk lesson and provides teachers with other resources for supplementing TED talk lessons.

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In order to plan lessons that include effective instructional strategies, it is critical for teachers to be aware of student aptitudes, personality variables, learning strategies, interests, aspirations, and talents. This paper presents a way for Russian teachers to improve their students' speaking abilities when learning foreign languages, called individualised resources, which are based on the concept of individualisation. Individualised resources are designed to help students to actively participate in the learning process, contribute to their productivity of learning and compensate for missing abilities when mastering foreign languages. In order to verify the effectiveness of this educational tool, qualitative and quantitative indicators were applied to a classroom-based study. Research findings illustrate how the approach enhanced the students' speaking abilities in terms of purposefulness, richness of speech content and logical progression of speech. The results presented in the article indicate that this type of training may be sufficient to shape speaking skills when teaching English.