Open up a whole new world of possibilities and experiences with these talks that show the benefit (and fun!) of learning a new language.

In her role at TED, Bianca DeJesus amplifies diverse voices from the TEDx community and creates educational resources for more than 50,000 global volunteers.

It’s all about understanding. These talks explore perspective -- looking past the stereotype and learning who people are, what they do and why they do it to build new cultural understandings.

English is fast becoming the world's universal language, and instant translation technology is improving every year. So why bother learning a foreign language? Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter shares four alluring benefits of learning an unfamiliar tongue.

Kristen Nguyen believes in the power of education to transform individuals and promote equity, inclusion and healing in communities.

Makhtoum Abdalla is passionate about equal access to quality education for all children and young people.

Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement and one of the few people in the world to have no job other than that of poet.

How much energy and brain power do we devote to learning how to spell? Language evolves over time, and with it the way we spell -- is it worth it to spend so much time memorizing rules that are filled with endless exceptions? Literary scholar Karina Galperin suggests that it may be time for an update in the way we think about and record language...

Jok Church created the science-education comic strip "You Can with Beakman and Jax" and the zany TV series "Beakman's World."

Kandice Sumner thinks we've been looking at the "achievement gap" in education all wrong.

Jay Walker explains why two billion people around the world are trying to learn English. He shares photos and spine-tingling audio of Chinese students rehearsing English -- "the world's second language" -- by the thousands.

Patricia Ryan is a longtime English teacher who asks a provocative question: Is the world's focus on English preventing the spread of great ideas in other languages? In other words: What if Einstein had to pass the TOEFL? It's a passionate defense of translating and sharing ideas.

Candice Neveu's mission is to help lifelong learners build the skills and the mindset they need to feel confident and be successful.

All it takes is a simple S to make most English words plural. But it hasn't always worked that way (and there are, of course, exceptions). John McWhorter looks back to the good old days when English was newly split from German -- and books, names and eggs were beek, namen and eggru! [Directed by Lippy, narrated by John McWhorter].

National Geographic Learning’s goal is to bring the world to the classroom, and the classroom to life for English language learners at all levels. With National Geographic Learning programs with TED Talks, students learn their world by experiencing it through the stories, ideas, photography and video of National Geographic and TED. TED Speaker ...

2013 was a year of hype for MOOCs (massive open online courses). Great big numbers and great big hopes were followed by some disappointing first results. But the head of edX, Anant Agarwal, makes the case that MOOCs still matter -- as a way to share high-level learning widely and supplement (but perhaps not replace) traditional classrooms. Agarw...

Onstage at TED2013, Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other -- using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments.

Since its inception, TED has been zealous in its mission of spreading ideas that inspire. It was out of this passion that a partnership between National Geographic Learning emerged to create materials for the English language learning classroom -- and help English learners to find their own voice. National Geographic Learning's goal is to...

"Do you know what I mean?" Legendary poet, lyricist and screenwriter Javed Akhtar asks why we seem to be losing our power to use words -- and inspires us to better understand and communicate with one another using this near-magical tool that carries our culture across generations. (In Hindi with English subtitles)

As political turmoil in Yemen continues, the editor of the Yemen Times, Nadia Al-Sakkaf, talks at TEDGlobal with host Pat Mitchell. Al-Sakkaf's independent, English-language paper is vital for sharing news -- and for sharing a new vision of Yemen and of that country's women as equal partners in work and change.

“The world has a new mania — a mania for learning English,” said Jay Walker on the TED stage in 2009. English is accepted as a shared language of science, a language of global business and the language of the Internet, with at least 1.5 billion students learning it worldwide. So the TED Distribution team wondered: What if students could l...

Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor leads a thoughtful and history-backed examination of one of the most divisive words in the English language: the N-word. Drawing from personal experience, she explains how reflecting on our points of encounter with the word can help promote productive discussions and, ultimately, create a framework that reshape...

What happens when we teach a computer how to learn? Technologist Jeremy Howard shares some surprising new developments in the fast-moving field of deep learning, a technique that can give computers the ability to learn Chinese, or to recognize objects in photos, or to help think through a medical diagnosis. (One deep learning tool, after watchin...

Early education is critical to children's success -- but millions of kids in the United States still don't have access to programs that prepare them to thrive in kindergarten and beyond. Enter the UPSTART Project, a plan to bring early learning into the homes of children in underserved communities, at no cost to families. Education innovator Cla...

Open office plans. Learning styles. 10,000 hours of practice. "Freakonomics" host Stephen Dubner joins Adam Grant for a live conversation to reveal why some popular workplace fads might be bogus -- and what to do instead.

Despite being ranked fifth of all countries in the world for language diversity, the United States tends to focus heavily on English in schools, with the native languages of students often going unrecognized. Educator Megan Alubicki Flick advocates for dual language programs— which focus on developing and sustaining two languages— and explains h...

He was a powerful king whose break with the church of Rome would forever change the course of English history. But was he a charismatic reformer who freed his subjects from a corrupt establishment or a bullying tyrant who used Parliament for his own personal gain? Mark Robinson and Alex Gendler put this controversial figure on trial in History v...

In 2006, open-learning visionary Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions (now called OpenStax), an open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

Leadership doesn't have a user's manual, but Fields Wicker-Miurin says stories of remarkable, local leaders are the next best thing. At a TED salon in London, she shares three.

When technologist Luis von Ahn was building the popular language-learning platform Duolingo, he faced a big problem: Could an app designed to teach you something ever compete with addictive platforms like Instagram and TikTok? He explains how Duolingo harnesses the psychological techniques of social media and mobile games to get you excited to l...