I have started TED Talks Discussion lesson recently, and so I have been watching a lot of videos to pick suitable ones for my lesson.

This is by far the most interesting and useful.  To be honest with you, some TED talks are pretty boring (sigh).

The speaker has high energy level, and has a great sense of humour.  I found her advice extremely useful.  I love this video so much I shared it on my Facebook page.  A lot of people, myself included, do the wrong things. I have learned a lot from Celeste's video and will follow her advice.

https://www.ted.com/talks/celeste_headlee_10_ways_to_have_a_better_conversation

In my TED talks lesson, students will be sent some discussion questions prior to the lesson, so they have ample time to prepare.  In this video, the discussion questions are:

1. Have you unfriended someone on Facebook or other social media sites because they said something offensive?

2. Is conversational competence important?  Do you think that the use of instant messages have affected our conversational competence?

3. The speaker said, “..look the person in the eye, think of interesting topics to discuss in advance… it is crap.  There is no reason to learn how to show you are paying attention if you are paying attention.”

 Do you agree or disagree?

4. What are the 10 rules? Select 2 and discuss.

Vocabulary

Anti-vax – anti-vaccines

Pundit- an expert in a particular subject

Pontificate – express one’s opinion that is considered annoying and overbearing

Conversational competence is the ability to comprehend and produce conversation based on one’s knowledge of conversational procedures and strategies, social context, speaker relations, and cultural practices