Abstract
TED is a non-profit global platform where conferences and speeches—brief but powerful—are held by people who, based on the TED’s motto, have an idea considered to be worth spreading. TED is often regarded as one of the best examples of positive globalization in its activity of knowledge-sharing and it defines itself as “a global community welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world” (Note 1). 
 
 As Heller (2012) said, TED’s talks are “sophisticated, popular, lucrative, socially conscious, and wildly pervasive—the Holy Grail of digital-age production”. However, in some recent newspaper articles TED’s approach to the dissemination of science has been criticized because considered simplistic, trivial and even biased (Bratton, 2013; Robbins, 2012). Notwithstanding, current studies in TED’s approach to scientific popularisation show that science is directly brought into contact with people, without any mediation (Scotto di Carlo, 2014a).
 
 The aim of this paper is to examine how a discipline such as positive psychology is represented in some successful speeches delivered by specialists at TED events. I will focus on the main linguistic and extra-linguistic strategies—such as non-verbal elements—used by experts and academics to convey specialized knowledge to lay people by using the main tools offered by discourse analysis. This will help to clarify whether this process of knowledge-dissemination established by this hybrid genre, is an effective mode of construing, representing and transmitting scientific information.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to examine how a discipline such as positive psychology is represented in some successful speeches delivered by specialists at TED events
After this short introduction to what TED is and how it works, I will concentrate my attention on a specific branch of science—positive psychology—in order to see how this discipline has been dealt with by scholars in TED talks, and comprehend how scientific concepts and theories can be been conveyed by experts to common ijel.ccsenet.org
Given that context plays a crucial role in Discourse Analysis (DA), it is necessary to contextualize TED talks in order to better understand how the popularization of science takes place and to this end the main elements that we should take into consideration are the following: 1) Popularization has changed in the digital age
Summary
TED is a non-profit making organization whose acronym means Technology, Entertainment and Design, and through which, conferences and speeches(Note 2) are delivered by people who have an idea considered to be “worth spreading” (Note 3). As TED grew, it widened its activity and operative modalities, no longer based exclusively on conferences and talks and on education (TED-Ed) and support to projects. The original TED conference takes place annually in North America, but it is present all over the world, especially in Europe and Asia, thanks to independently organized events called TEDx, each of which can be watched freely on the TED website with a system of automatically generated subtitles in most languages and available for reading thanks to transcripts. It is noteworthy that TED has been gaining weight in English Language Teaching (ELT). More and more teachers all over the world use TED talks in class and develop conference-related activities to teach English innovatively(Note 6)
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