Developing Students Discourse Competence Based On the Use of TED-Ed

This study deals with ways to improve students’ spoken discourse competence with the help of the educational platform TED-Ed. The relevance of the research can be attributed to the need to meet current Russian educational standards for university students to have a high level of communicative competence and to keep pace with the rising popularity of using information technology in the process of language learning. The primary aim of this research was to design the procedure developing spoken discourse competence, in particular, monologues based on the use of TED Talks and that could be implemented within the English language course ''Speech Practice'' of the 1st year HSE university students. To this end, the theoretical foundations of developing students’ spoken discourse competence were analyzed. Besides, the hypothesis that students are interested in lessons grounded on TED and that teachers find this platform useful for developing students’ discourse competence was tested by conducting questionnaires for both students and teachers. We have also studied the syllabus '' Keynote Upper- Intermediate Student’s Book'' (Stephenson, Dummett & Lansford, 2015) based on TED and identified possible gaps connected with speaking activities, in particular, monologues. Finally, we have designed the procedure developing the 1st year university students’ spoken discourse competence, namely such forms of monologues as storytelling and summary provided with the commentary that were based on 2 TED Talks and TBLT framework. The results of the study might be useful for the teachers of this course and for those who are interested in trying platforms during language lessons. However, since our study was limited in time and scope, we find the elaborated tasks worth to test within the ''Speech Practice'' course to obtain the materials to work with for the further research. Keywords: discourse competence,monologues, TED, TBLT