ABSTRACT
This chapter departs from the consensus in current research that students need to encounter Global Englishes within their ELT classrooms in order to be prepared for the sociolinguistic reality of their current and future lives outside the classroom. Recent teaching material starts to address this need but focuses mainly on audio files to do so. Based on insights from multimodality studies, the chapter argues that audio-visual texts are better suited for these purposes. The chapter presents and fuses arguments from the perspectives of language acquisition theory, (trans-)cultural learning, and multiliteracies pedagogy. We argue that TED-talks are a genre that is particularly well suited for Global Englishes encounters and illustrate our reasoning with examples from one specific TED-talk to which we apply our theoretical framework. The chapter concludes by providing task suggestions that exploit the multimodal affordances of TED-talks and address the areas of language learning, cultural learning, and genre learning.
