TED Talks as an ICT Tool to Promote Communicative Skills in EFL Students

In many EFL classrooms in Colombia, it is evident how students struggle trying to use English to communicate; nonetheless, with the revolution of ICTs that has taken place in the last years, there is a variety of tools available to support English learning autonomously with applications, blogs, and online courses; however, many of these tools were not originally designed for teaching but can be adapted for such purpose. TED is a website and a downloadable application where videos are shared in which you can see a wide variety of English speakers born in many parts around the world speaking in a fun and familiar manner with the audience about various topics of interest that besides, come along with cultural content, which extends the range of accents, words, expressions, and ways of referring to the same topic. In this action research, we propose a reflection on the incidence of TED talks on the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. The instruments used to collect data were interviews, questionnaires, and teacher journals. The use of these videos provided the students with all the communicative elements that allowed them to use English to express their ideas. This offers a glimpse of how useful authentic videos and subtitles are when encouraging students to learn English.