Abstract:

Creativity is one of the effective skills required by EFL learners to face the continual challenges of the 21st job market (Lambropoulos, Kampylis, & Bakharia, 2009). We as EFL educators work on developing our learners’ creativity through several language processes and skills, among them the writing skill. When producing their ideas, students use writing as a thinking tool for language and creativity. More specifically, in the brainstorming process, writers activate their prior knowledge (content schema) to bring forward their stored ideas about the topic and produce a new relevant input. However, the lack of reading culture among our youth today has greatly affected the quality of their writing. Due to their underdeveloped world-knowledge schema, they struggle with the brainstorming step or even skip it. The result is essays that lack sufficient content and maturity of ideas. Hence, not only is activation of prior knowledge required but also the amount of activation is to be considered. Accordingly, the purpose of the research study was to investigate the utility of short Ted Talk videos as a motivating tool that activates enough prior knowledge within a short time. The participants were 21 Lebanese undergraduates in the sophomore writing class. Data was collected through questionnaires and focus group interviews, in addition to the writing corpus. Preliminary data analysis revealed the effectiveness of the approach in helping students overcome the challenge of brainstorming and outlining, expand their content with supporting details, show deep thinking, and feel more confident about writing. Future studies would be helpful in testing the effect of Ted Talk videos on the writing quality of all types of learners, including the visual ones.

Keywords:

Ted Talk videos, EFL writing, Content Schema, Prior Knowledge Activation, Brainstorming.