USE OF TED TALKS MEDIA CONTENT FOR DEVELOPMENT OF SOFT SKILLS AT FOREIGN LANGUAGES CLASSES IN A NON-LINGUISTIC UNIVERSITY

The article deals with the organization of the process of teaching foreign languages in a non-linguistic university in order to develop soft skills; a terminological analysis of the concept of "soft skills" is carried out, its classification characteristics are given, and the linguistic and methodological potential of TED Talks media content is determined. The author pays special attention to the development and description of a communication-oriented methodology for working with materials from the TED Talks service in order to develop soft skills in foreign language classes at a non-linguistic university.

A Study on Instructional Humor: How Much Humor Is Used in Presentations?

Humor is applied in pedagogy to create a positive learning environment. Recent research focuses on the theories, effects, individual differences, and qualitative aspects of humor for instruction. However, there is a lack of studies focusing on quantitative features. Therefore, this research explored the quantitative characteristics of instructional humor in a naturalistic setting and applied techniques from natural language processing (NLP). This paper describes the results of two studies. The first study focused on instructional humor frequency and the placement of humor, while the linguistic features of instructional humor and non-instructional humor were compared in the second study. Two corpora were used in this research: TED Talks and user-submitted jokes from “stupidstuff.org” The results found that educators used humor 12.92 times for popular talks, while less popular talks only had 3.92 times. Humor is also more commonly placed during the first parts of the talk and lessens toward the end. There were also significant differences between the linguistic features of instructional and non-instructional humor in terms of readability scores and sentiment. These results provide a substantial update on quantitative instructional humor research and help educators understand how to use humor in the classroom in terms of quantitative and linguistic features.

Don’t go all “TED Talks” on them, but... make a good presentation! – teaching the oral genre through the didactic sequence procedures

Language teaching in a higher education (HE) environment is complex and challenging, much more so when we consider the contemporary demands concerning the additional languages, specifically, English. We start from the understanding that a genre-based approach in teaching is established as a positive strategy for teaching/learning and developing students’ linguistics skills. However, reflections and questions emerge when, as professors, we discuss the role of the HE and its disciplines in potentializing students' actions through language in real social practices, which can contribute to their personal and professional development. Our premise, as well as a problem, considering there seems to be a gap regarding this point, is that academic oral genres should be taught in a systematic and clear way in HE. Seeking to solve this problem, by the supports of Applied Linguistics, we structured two questions to guide this qualitative and exploratory study: 1) What would be an appropriate theory-oriented approach to support the teaching of oral genres in HE? 2) Considering the HE contexts, what would an achievable proposal aiming at the mastery of an oral genre be like? In order to answer these questions, we brought a theoretical discussion and also a Didactic Sequence (DS) regarding oral presentations in academic events as a proposal to show that the Socio-discursive Interactionism and the DS model can be powerful educators’ allies in planning and organizing classes that allow students to perform through language in different academic routines

Affect in science communication: A data-driven analysis of TED talks

Science communication is changing. It is increasingly directed not only at peers but at the public in general. Accordingly, understanding the circumstances under which audience members engage with scientific content is crucial to improving science communication. In this article, we investigate the role of affect on audience engagement with a modern form of science communication: TED talks. We examined how affect valence---a net positive or negative affect---and density---the proportion of affective words---are associated with a talk's popularity---reflecting views and likes---and polarity---reflecting dislikes and comments. We found that the valence of TED talks was associated with both popularity and polarity, with positive valence being linked to higher talk popularity and lower talk polarity. Density, on the other hand, was only associated with popularity, with higher affective density being linked to higher popularity---even more so than valence---but not polarity. Moreover, we observed that the association between affect and engagement was partially moderated by talk topic. Specifically, whereas higher density was related to higher popularity across most topics, valence seemed to particularly impact the popularity and polarity of TED talks on social topics, which regularly discuss polarizing issues such as race or political conflicts. We discuss implications of our findings for increasing the effectiveness of science communication.

Enabling Criticality: A Top-down Bottom-up Approach to Using TED Talks in EAP Listening Classes

The use of TED talks in EAP has gained popularity in recent years and they are promoted through coursebooks as a means of simultaneously developing listening and critical thinking skills. However, a traditional comprehension approach to teaching listening; one that focuses on testing lower-order thinking skills through discrete questions may be inadequate as a gateway into a critical consideration of broader issues for second language learners. With the practical purpose of developing a teaching approach to using TED talks informed by current theory, the chapter begins with a consideration of how critical thinking processes and top-down and bottom-up listening processes can be integrated into a singular model. Based on this framework, a genre analysis of the TED talk is made by taking a learner’s perspective in order to identify cognitive and affective barriers to listening that may restrict opportunities for critical thinking. In the discussion that follows, five activities are suggested for use with TED talks in listening classes that support top-down and bottom-up listening processes, and which set students up to analyse and evaluate the thesis and underlying structure of a TED talk, providing a solid foundation from which to approach discussion topics critically and reflectively.

SMART LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

The article considers the issue of teaching a foreign language to students of high-level institutions. The purpose of the article is to investigate the educational potential of TED Talks as a powerful tool that can be effectively used for preparing future professionals to communicate in an academic and professional environment. The democratic, apolitical and unpredictable nature of the TED Talks platforms was emphasized, as well as the value of this project in expanding the students’ worldview. The significance and relevance of the TED Talks project are substantiated. It is emphasized that the videos meet modern requirements for the formation of skills, competencies, and values, such as creativity, critical thinking, communicative visibility, media literacy, flexibility, etc. The main methods used in the article are divided into theoretical (analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization, modeling, classification) and empirical (document analysis, expert survey). The advantages of using and the urgency of implementation TED Talks presentations as educational material in English classes are outlined; the usefulness for students' socio-cultural development, vocabulary expansion, improvement of listening, reading, speaking skills, as well as the ability to make presentations and note what is heard is revealed. The analysis of numerous videos allowed us to determine the main criteria for video selection. We concluded that one of the main tasks of modern education is to create a stable students’ motivation to acquire knowledge, the other is to find new forms and tools for mastering this knowledge through creative solutions. The use of Smart learning technologies opens up many new opportunities in learning, which improve students' concentration, speed up a mastering of learning material and as a result, increase the success of each student.