Learning English Literature through Multimedia

Computer technology and multimedia have long been taken advantage of in the education field as the application offers many benefits. A line of studies have indicated that utilising the right combination of multimedia elements has influenced the way students learn, increased their performance and affected the learning environments. The study aims to fulfil three fundamental research objectives: to design a learning model by adopting the storytelling approach that can be used in the multimedia courseware; to develop a multimedia courseware for learning English literature (BC-C); to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the developed courseware. The development of BC-C takes into consideration the pedagogical aspects and the elements of multimedia in a single digital environment. The courseware allows the students to visualize the plots in the literature story, understand bombastic and archaic words and at the same time make learning process fun and enjoyable. The developed courseware adapted ADDIE methodology into the BC-C Life Cycle, as the Instructional Design Method which uses Macromedia Director, Flash and other multimedia software. The four modules in the courseware include the story itself, exploratory module, reinforcement section, and enrichment activities. The Storytelling approach in BC-C is presented via 2D cartoon movie to help the students visualize the flow of the plots for the selected English literature short story – the Black Cat. The study employed a Quasi experimental design with the sample study consisted of sixty second semester, Foundation program students. Pre-test and post-test, direct observation, questionnaires and interview were used to measure the effectiveness and usability of the courseware. The results indicate the effectiveness and the usefulness of the BC-C prototype in learning English literature at a pre-university level.