Multiple Intelligences and Multimedia in the ESP Classroom: The Rural Urban Distinction

This study establishes how the concept of multiple intelligences can be integrated into the ESP classroom to discover how it impacts the writing performance of both urban and rural students. The design of activities to be carried out was aimed at drawing upon the learners’ more developed intelligences while working on their weaker ones. The methodology employed was an experimental comparison of scores of the two groups of subjects – urban and rural, under two different teaching modes; the first being the everyday teaching styles that learners are exposed to as opposed to one with the incorporation of multimedia and multiple intelligences. This is a longitudinal study that included a sample of 200 respondents from Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman’s (UTAR) urban and rural campuses, that were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the regular and multiple intelligences teaching styles and the differences in performance of urban and rural participants. The unit of analysis was an individual (students) and self-administered questionnaire that was considered for gathering data at an empirical level as proposed by Gardner (1993) in a lesson based on a video presentation entitled “An Inconvenient Truth” on Global Warming. The lesson employed various aspects of learning using visual animation and verbal narration while at the same time encouraging divergent thinking to complete tasks, using convergent aspects of linguistics for both urban and rural students so as to evaluate the significance of this lesson on the students’ performance. This study includes the analyses of average (mean) value of the scores and paired sample testing using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The results reiterate the fact that the use of multiple intelligences in the ESP classroom is far more effective as they register higher mean scores as compared to the regular teaching style.