Ted Talks as a Digital Material in Foreign Language Teaching

Abstract

The paper considers the opportunity of practical use of TED Talks as a digital material in the process of foreign language teaching and learning in educational institutions of different types. It has been shown that TED Talks are quite a significant and powerful tool for developing students’ speaking skills. The students improve their communication skills in a foreign language; definitely, it provides further professional opportunities for getting and sharing information, experience, ideas and views. The paper illustrates that the spheres of influence of TED Talks materials, which will be used in the educational process, can be conditionally divided into four groups such as socio-cultural dimension, competence dimension, language dimension and psychological dimension. It is emphasized that TED Talks can be multifunctional, satisfying almost any didactic request. However, the teacher should take into account the certain criteria for choosing a video watching. These criteria are: what video is about, the usefulness of the topic video; the appropriateness of the video to the academic environment and the length of the video. All of these criteria help to create the video to be successful and effective. If the teacher neglects these choosing criteria, the teacher will have a negative result after the video watching and during the discussion of this video among students. The paper also highlights that the use of TED Talks during foreign language teaching helps the teacher to solve a number of problems, in particular, to overcome the negative impact of interlanguage interference, and to increase students’ motivation to learn a foreign language. Furthermore, it helps to make foreign language teaching more interesting and creative.