| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 應用外語系 === 102 === Digital learning has frequently been used as a vehicle over the past decade for reaching educational goals, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) as one of the famous platforms among the online educational resources has hit more than 1 billion views. TED was launched in 1984 with purpose of capturing and amplifying voices of great speakers around the world. TED talks as well as multi-language subtitles are available online. The present study aims to explore the engaging ways of TED talks in three different levels of language (i.e., lexical level, syntactic level, and contextual level). Transcripts of the top 200 TED talks with most views (475,833 tokens) delivered from 2001 to 2014 were constructed for the analysis.
In terms of lexical level and syntactic level of language, 200 most frequently used words and top 100 three-, four-, and five-word clusters among the corpus were identified and analyzed in the study. In terms of contextual level of language, seven commonly used speech arrangements applied in TED talks were classified (i.e., spatial chronological, topical, comparison and contrast, causal, psychological, and Monroe’s motivated sequence). In addition, by dividing clusters, the speech arrangement of invention speeches in TED talks was found similar to the common organization of the academic writings (i.e., introduction and motivation of research, literature review, methodology, results, and conclusion.) However, literature review are usually omitted, research approaches are often simplified. Demonstration and explanation of results remains the main focus of among the research corpus. Sections include mentioning to research team, challenge, application, current status, and acknowledgement seem to be optional. Another finding of clusters TEDsters share in common was also identified, especially the two ways they share in common as proofs to test independent variables: (1) to mention the same research conducted in different places and (2) to mention the same research but in slightly different forms conducted in the same place.
As for the analysis to the length distribution of TED talks, 32% of the speeches were found to have exceeded the 18-minute slot rule set by TED. The distribution shows that 90% of the speeches are finished between 3 to 21 minutes. Besides, among the exceeded talks, about 90% of them are contributed by speakers from three fields: life, physical, and social science, arts, design, entertainment, and media fields, and education, training, and library occupations. According to findings, the study suggests that an appropriate length of a speech that could be accepted by the audience should between 3 to 21 minutes.
The study expects to provide useful references for idiomatic use of English in delivering TED-like speeches. Also, the study is hoped to improve ESL and EFL
learners’ learning efficiency in obtaining skills of delivering speeches as well as to provide some insightful pedagogical implications and applications in teaching both public speaking and daily communication.
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