Selecting, grading, and teaching TED Talks-based listening lessons

On Saturday March 26th, Nagano JALT was fortunate to host Dr. Naheen Madarbakus-Ring and she gave a presentation on how to teach listening with TED Talks. Naheen’s presentation was split into three parts. She first explained some of the theory behind listening and what students go through on a neurological, pragmatic, linguistic and semantic level. Next she explained how to use the TED website and many of the features, such as how to use the search function. The different ways you can filter videos and additional features such as playlists, transcripts and subtitles. She then explained an important part of preparing to use a TED talk is to analyze the vocabulary and shared a website – https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/ – which can scan the transcript of the vocabulary and categorize words by their difficulty. Effectively creating a word list to prepare your students, and also gauging if the language may be too easy or too challenging for your class. Finally, Naheen shared a plethora of pre-, while- and post-listening exercises that she uses and outlined the reasons and importance of why she does some of these activities. Thank you again Naheen for a very insightful presentation, I’m sure many of the attendees gained some very valuable knowledge of using not just TED talks but any listening activities in class.