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With a view to advancing their students’ listening comprehension and vocabulary, English for Science teachers are frequently in search of new and interesting audio and video materials. TED Talks on science topics are a good option for this purpose. But just how suitable, vocabulary-wise, are they for English for Science learners? This study explores the lexical profile of TED Talks on science and compares it against non-science TED Talks and science academic lectures. We use a 5-million-word TED Talk corpus, with a 1.3-million-word science subsection. Of the two categories of TED Talks, it is the science ones that are lexically more similar to science academic lectures. Science TED Talks also feature significantly more technical vocabulary than non-science TED Talks. Reasonable listening comprehension is achieved at 4,000 words for science TED Talks, while ideal comprehension is achieved at 8,000 words for both categories. These results recommend science TED Talks for English for Science listening.

PurposeThis paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation targeted to the general audience. The proposed conceptual model suggests that innovation fits well with more abstract language because of the association of innovation with imagination and distal construal. Moreover, communication of innovation may benefit from greater adherence to the narrativity arc, that is, early staging, increasing plot progression and climax optimal point. These effects are moderated by content variety and emotional tone, respectively.Design/methodology/approachBased on a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) application on a sample of 3225 TED Talks transcripts, the authors identify 287 TED Talks on innovation, and then applied econometric analyses to test the hypotheses on the effects of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity on engagement, and on the moderation effects of content variety and emotional tone.FindingsThe authors found that abstractness (vs concreteness) and narrativity have positive effects on engagement. These two effects are stronger with higher content variety and more positive emotional tone, respectively.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper extends the literature on communication of innovation, linguistics and text analysis by evaluating the roles of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity in shaping appreciation of innovation.Originality/valueThis paper reports conceptual and empirical analyses on innovation dissemination through a popular medium – TED Talks – and applies modern text analysis algorithms to test hypotheses on the effects of two pivotal dimensions of language on user engagement.

Since its first appearance as the infrastructure supporting Bitcoin, blockchain has received different waves of attention from practitioners and academics. Besides the degree of interest, the attention to blockchain has often focused not merely on its own potential and characteristics but on its applications field. However, looking at its application and deployment in domains other than cryptocurrency or the nascent non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain technology does not seem to be widely adopted or is still in its early stages. Given this, we are interested in how managers and the general public are informed about new technology other than through academic papers or the specialized press. In this paper, we analyze how blockchain has been presented by speakers invited to give TED and TEDx Talks to identify the most common terms used to present blockchain in these talks using a multi-methods approach (qualitative analysis and big data analysis) and see if the discourse surrounding blockchain has shifted over time. The results of this study show how the different perspectives brought by broadcasters like TED often overshadow a technological innovation like the blockchain in its evolution and application by the fact that the focus is instead shifted to products and services built on it. Also, this study shows how different degrees of attention and expertise are associated with each fashion wave of new or emergent technology innovations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the educational sector, pushing it towards teaching–learning methodologies where the online aspect takes on special importance. In this sense, social media are tools that facilitate the creation of meaningful and sustainable learning environments. This study shares an educational experience where TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks are introduced as a pedagogical resource through YouTube and LinkedIn in a sport management course. A total of five TED Talks are viewed and discussed by the students in order to develop their professional profile, assisted by a set of initial questions posed by faculty. To assess the impact of the experience, a new scale is created and then validated. The analyses performed reflected the unidimensional nature of this scale, explaining the 64.36% of the variance, and presenting good psychometric properties (α = 0.95). Furthermore, the results obtained reflect the educational potential of TED Talks in the context of sport management, with increases in the averages of all the items from the scale, with significant (p < 0.05) increases in six of them. Both the new validated instrument and the shared pedagogical proposal can be valuable to guide and evaluate future educational experiences which introduce TED Talks as a pedagogical resource in sport management education.

This study explores the integration of ChatGPT-4 into the qualitative research process, focusing on the methodology of Situational Analysis by Adele Clarke and analysing TED Talks transcripts. Findings show ChatGPT's ability to process data quickly in initial coding, formulating broader categories reflecting Clarke's complexity of “situation,” recognising human and non-human elements, discourses, debates, and issues, temporal and spatial. In analysing data for different map types (situational, social worlds and arenas, positional), ChatGPT-4 “understands” their different analytical purposes, recognising different levels of abstraction and theoretical structuring. The research highlighted the challenges for generative AI in translating complex theoretical frameworks into situational maps and visual representations and underlined the importance of effective prompting strategies. Also, the study identified several roles for generative AI in qualitative research, including co-analyst, consultant and trainer, highlighting the central role of human researchers in decision making and interpretation.

It can be seen that entrepreneurship has undergone many changes since the time it was defined and many types have been introduced over time as well. A relatively new type is sustainable entrepreneurship, which seeks to function in a way that can be passed down through the generations without endangering nature’s responsiveness. Sustainable entrepreneurs sometimes perform their activities in a way that emphasizes the social aspect, and sometimes in a way that highlights the economic aspect. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) announced by the United Nations in 2015 are expected to correspond to the activities of sustainable entrepreneurs. In order to identify this correspondence, we performed qualitative content analysis of presentations on entrepreneurship in TED Talks. As a result of the analysis, the social and economic aspects of sustainable entrepreneurs were evaluated separately with the SDGs, and strong correlations were determined in some instances. These correlations are expected to provide insight in terms of identifying the topics that sustainable entrepreneurs focus on.

Learning methods play a significant role and receive more and more attention in this digital era where everyone wants something exciting, dynamic, effective, and interactive. This paper argues that one of the essential tasks of the current communication age and of a modern-day teacher is the enhancement of presentation literacy through the encouragement and development of students’ creative, communicative, and interactive skills. The article provides some of the reasons why present-day teaching should lay account on a new type learner, i.e. a net gener, and his needs as well as his expectations in the learning environment in the 21st century. The skill of effective public speaking or the practice of the commonly called presentations is brought into focus alongside. The study employed a survey on the usefulness and effectiveness of the presentation assignment which integrated TED Talks and topic-related creative activities. The research involved the students of Creative Industries study program at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania. As a result, a more creative and interactive learning method of delivering presentations and becoming more self-confident speakers proved to be beneficial among students. Their reflections revealed their attitude towards the effectiveness of the activity and offered insights into the learning process on how to help teachers cater to changing students’ needs. The implications of this article are relevant to all stakeholders in higher education.

This study investigated the effects of four subtitle modes on the listening comprehension of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks and academic vocabulary learning of intermediate (non-English major) and advanced (English major) English as foreign language (EFL) learners. A total of 272 Chinese college sophomore students were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental groups: Dual subtitles, English subtitles, Chinese subtitles, and no subtitles. The participants viewed four TED talks videos over a period of two weeks and were pretested (vocabulary) and posttested (vocabulary, listening comprehension). The results demonstrated that there were no statistically significant differences among the four subtitle modes for intermediate learners. However, the findings showed significant differences among the four subtitle modes for advanced learners. Specifically, the no subtitle and dual subtitle groups performed significantly better than the English subtitle group on vocabulary learning. The Chinese subtitle group significantly outperformed the no subtitle group on listening comprehension. Taken together, the results for advanced English students indicated that the redundancy effect may exist in vocabulary learning and that adding dual subtitles may not impose high cognitive load. Accordingly, this study offered important implications for learning English through watching videos using different subtitle modes for Chinese students.

The development of TED Talks textbooks has been a welcoming addition to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogy. The textbooks offer educators and learners a suitable framework for practicing all four of the language skills (i.e., listening, reading, speaking, and writing). However, the use of TED Talk resources could create specific vocabulary challenges for learners as they progress through each unit in the textbook. Research suggests that although textbook frameworks encompassing listening resources benefit learners with a familiar lesson approach, the varying vocabulary load and the presence of academic vocabulary and multiword units (MWUs) presented between the chosen resources and the textbook itself could lead to comprehension difficulties for learners. This study investigates the vocabulary of 12 TED Talks included in the commercial textbook Keynote 2 to understand the lexical profile, vocabulary load, and the academic and multiword unit coverage for each of the chosen listening texts. The results showed that the TED Talks selections and the textbook provided inadequate vocabulary practice, limited academic vocabulary exposure, and a lack of item repetition for learners. The study suggests the inclusion of ideal supplementary materials and appropriate TED Talk selections to help provide educators with suitable guidance to support their learners’ varying vocabulary knowledge.

TED Talks are still an unexplored genre of argumentation in which narrative arguments are often used in TED speakers’ strategic maneuvering to support a standpoint. In the present study, I combine the constructs of narrative positioning (NP) and strategic maneuvering (SM) to offer a conceptualization of how narrative is used in pragmatic argumentation as well as provide an exemplary analysis of a specific case of narrative arguments that were used in Winch’s (How to practice emotional first aid. https://www.ted.com/talks/guy_winch_the_case_for_emotional_hygiene.2014, 2014) TED Talk. The proposed integration aims to provide a theoretical framework and empirical tools for reconstructing narrative arguments through connecting the underlying formal structure of narrative with aspects of TED speakers’ strategic maneuvering. Drawing on NP and SM constructs, the critical analysis explores how Winch’s narratives or “small stories” were strategically manipulated to support his stance with regard to the importance of mental health and to examine whether or not the use of narrative arguments as argumentation moves helped to enhance the dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness of Winch’s argument. The analysis shows that the macro context and the knowledge gap between TED speakers and the audience makes the use of narrative arguments extremely effective. Although narrative arguments often receive criticism about their validity in providing sufficient evidence for a standpoint, their dialectical power lies in the flexibility of describing events in different fashions to draw pragmatic inferences that support the speaker’s stance. The study fills an important gap in the literature as it integrates recent approaches in narrative theory in the reconstruction and evaluation of narrative arguments in TED Talks.