The effect of multimedia instruction on students’ learning of the British culture

Abstract EN

The paper presents an overview of a research on teaching British culture using multimedia.

The purpose of this study is to find out the effect of using multimedia materials on students' learning, motivation, and their retention of the British cultural knowledge.

To this end, an experiment of two equivalent groups was designed, one of the groups is experimental and the other is control ; each of them consists of thirty three (33) students.

Same lessons were given to two different groups in different ways ; one through using multimedia technology, while the other group through lecturing and discussion technique.

Both groups were subjected to pre and post tests.

The study used a quasi- experimental design to assess the effectiveness of multimedia material by measuring students' British cultural knowledge and their perceptions of the content taught in one semester, in addition to the amount of knowledge retained after one year.

The analyzed results support our initial hypotheses that first year undergraduate students, over the course of one semester, can significantly improve their overall British cultural knowledge, they are more motivated and interested compared to students belonging to the traditional classroom and more importantly because of these materials students memorized well and could retain a good amount of the cultural knowledge acquired in the classroom.