THE EFFECTS OF TED TALKS AS EXTENSIVE LISTENING

Abstract

Learning a foreign language is more considered on productive skills such as speaking and writing, but also listening and reading are essential as they provide crucial input to learners. Listening is a typical activity with a great deal of oral exposure to a language. Therefore, extensive listening (EL) is helpful in a way that the learners engage with a variety of comprehensible input. This qualitative method study investigated whether there is a relationship between students’ listening achievements and the use of TED lectures as an extensive listening resource in the classroom. Moreover, this study explored the students’ perceptions of the use of TED lectures as EL materials in the treatment period. To shed light on these issues, 20 school students, who learned English as a foreign language participated in this study. The results also indicated that students found extensive listening enjoyable and useful to learn new vocabulary. Moreover, they expressed that the subtitles make the speech more comprehensible for the parts that were challenging to comprehend.