Today's lesson is about improving your English by using TED Talks.
Let's get started, you may have heard about TED Talks from a friend or a teacher. TED talks are fun and interesting speeches by professionals. These speeches are usually given in English and often come with subtitles and transcripts in many different languages. If you don't know what a TED talk is you can visit the website ted.com. It's a great way to listen to authentic native English speakers. This is very helpful for students, especially for students who don't have the opportunity to use English very often. This makes TED a fantastic tool to
help you improve your English. Using this website you can improve your listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
As a teacher I have developed a great method and system for using TED Talks to improve your English.
It's also a very interesting and fun way to learn English.
Let's take a look at the website start by typing ted.com into your internet browser. This is the basic front page of Ted.com. Next, bring your mouse pointer to the watch title at the top and choose TED talks. This brings you to the screen where you can search for videos.
Now you want to choose what kind of video you want to see to improve your English listening. You can choose any duration, but short videos are the easiest. So, click duration and choose 0 to 6 minutes. As you can see, all the videos are now under 6 minutes long. You can also choose which language you speak. Click languages, and choose your native language. I'm choosing Korean. You can see there are more languages like this. Simply choose see all languages. Now you can choose whatever topic you like. There are many different topics. If you click see all topics. Let's choose technology for now. There are many videos. Click on any video that interests you.
Now you can do many things on this webpage.
First, you can simply watch the video and listen to it without any subtitles or transcript to help you by pressing the play button. Next let's choose our subtitles. Move your mouse to this button and choose English you can also choose your native language. Let's look at the transcript. Click transcript: now you can see the English transcript and the speech is even highlighted for you in blue. You can easily follow this. Play the video and read the transcript. You can also change the transcript language like this: click this button where it says English and choose a different language.
Now let's learn the method for how to use ted.com to study English.
Here are the steps that you can follow:
Step 1: choose a video that is 0 to 6 minutes and is also in
your native language.
Step 2: watch the video without subtitles and try to answer
this question: what is the main idea of the video? Also, write down any new words you can hear.
Step 3: watch the video again, but with English subtitles. Try to answer the
question again: what is the main idea of the video? Also write down any new words
you can hear or see in the subtitles.
Step 4: Watch the video again, but with subtitles of your native language. You should be able to understand the main idea of the video.
Step 5: Just listen to the video and read along with the English transcript. You can pause the video to hear the pronunciation of any new words you hear. Use the Internet to search for the definitions of any new words or phrases.
Step 6: Just listen to the video again, but read along with the transcript in your
language.
Step 7: Go back to step 1 and try to watch the video without any subtitles or transcript you should be able to understand it better than before.
Here's a helpful tip: you can pause the video to listen to specific words or phrases that you don't understand.
These steps will help you improve your English listening and English reading very much. There are also two ways to improve your writing. First, write the answer to the question: what is the main idea of the video? Second, summarize the main contents of the video in a written paragraph. Use some of the new words as well to improve your English speaking. First, try to say the new English words exactly how the speaker in the video says them, or you can read your writing. Try to copy some of the same pronunciation from the video.
Okay, I hope that helps you to improve your English using TED Talks.
Bye now.
