English language pre-service teachers’ perspectives on TED Talks as an educational support.

Abstract

The study examines the potential educational value of TED (technology, entertainment, and design) Talks as supplementary resources in the form of an assignment for teaching English as a foreign language in a teacher education context. Three questions guided our research: (1) What are English language pre-service teachers’ perspectives on the use of TED Talks in a course for teacher education? (2) What are the problems uttered by English language pre-service teachers on the use of TED Talks in a course for teacher education? (3) What are English language pre-service teachers’ suggestions for improving the use of TED Talks as educational support? The data for this case study were collected by means of an open-ended survey questionnaire prepared by the researchers. Sixty-one first-grade university students majoring in teaching English as a foreign language participated in this study as a part of their regular listening and pronunciation course for a semester. The data were analyzed using a simple thematic analysis. The results revealed a number of factors affecting the pre-service teachers’ perspectives on the use of TED Talks in a course for teacher education. Varying, interesting, and informative content, exposure to various accents, listening and pronunciation practice outside the class, embracing a positive mindset, and being granted the autonomy to choose the video to watch each week were among the most frequently mentioned positive factors, while workload, time constraints, and difficulty finding a suitable video to watch were among the most frequently mentioned negative ones. Implications for integrating TED Talks into language teacher education and foreign language teaching were discussed.