Designing Listening Tasks Based on TED Talks for English Majored Students

Abstract

Under the light of Communicative Language Teaching approach, the use of authentic materials to design effective tasks has been warmly encouraged. Among a variety of resources designed to create authentic materials, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks a set of free videos on a wide variety of topics- is considered as a learning source that gives students a profound knowledge with authentic English. Lesson plans featuring TED talks can be used to bridge the gap between classroom knowledge and real-world practices. This research investigates how to design effective TED talks listening tasks for English majored students and its possible effects on students’ listening skill. The research was carried out with the participation of 176 English majored students in their third academic year and 5 teachers at Hanoi University of Industry (HaUI). Data for this study included an online survey for students, and 15-minute semi-structured interviews for teachers. Theresults show that listening tasks designed from TED talks received possitive feedback from the participant informants. Through observation, we see that after 15 weeks of practice, the students have made significant improvement in their listening skill. The teachers’s recommended types of designed listening tasks are listing and/or brainstorming; ordering and sorting and comparing. These types of tasks are also of sutability to students’ preference. It is hoped that the research would provide EFL teachers with new ideas about some benefits of TED talks to their students during the process of mastering the second language.