Ted talks in the speaking skill

Abstract

Nowadays, new technological advances and innovations are being developed for facilitating peoples’ lives. Language learning is not the exception as new online resources allow both teachers and students to facilitate the teaching-learning process. One of these online resources is TED talks, a video platform that offers a wide range of educational and interesting videos disseminated by expert speakers. Reason why the current study aimed to analyze the influence of TED talks in the development of speaking skills. The study had a pre-experimental design with the participation of 37 students from the fifth semester “B” of “Pedagogía de los Idiomas Nacionales y Extranjeros” program at Technical University of Ambato. The treatment consisted of exposing students to some TED talk videos in order to analyze the speaking subskills of the speakers. The main research tool was a pre and post-test adapted from the FCE (First Certificate of English) speaking exam. In the same way, a survey was administered to the whole group to know about students’ attitudes and insights towards TED talks. To analyze the data gathered, the researcher used the software IBM SPSS that enabled to perform frequency analysis, a normality test comparing differences between pre- and post-tests and the hypothesis verification through the application of the T – students test. Results showed that TED Talk videos had positive effects on the development of speaking skills and subskills such as fluency, pronunciation and discourse management