The Effect of a Suggested Listening Comprehension Multimedia Program on Developing Students' English Academic Skills.

Abstract

Abstract

The aim of this experimental study is to investigate the effect of a suggested multimedia listening programme, designed by the researcher, on a class of 33 freshman students who study dentistry (experiment group) as oppose to a 31 student control group. The programme techniques and activities were basically designed in the light of the students’ major. The material was purely based on dentistry in a form of authentic academic lectures. All lectures were from The YouTube Website. The videos were selected thoroughly by the researcher taking into consideration some aspects like the length of the videos to fit the class time (90 mins), culture sensitivity and the benefit of the material for the students in general. The experiment took place in Al_ Qassim College of Dentistry in Qassim Region, Saudi Arabia. The underlying research question addressed in this study was What is the effect of a - ten-week training listening comprehension multimedia programme on the listening ability of the freshman students at the College of Dentistry in Qassim, Saudi Arabia? The researcher selected two random samples of dentistry freshmen dental students (64 students), the first sample was the experimental group while the other one was 31 students representing the control group who were taught their regular lectures as preplanned by the college. After conducting an academic listening comprehension skills T-test (both paired and independent) before the treatment, the researcher started implementing the programme. The programme consisted of ten 2- minute videos clips for 10 lessons. It presented and tested listening sub kills of skimming, scanning, inference and summarizing. At the end of the ten-week training, a test was held again for both groups to investigate the progress of both groups. According to the results, the progress that the experimental group has performed was significantly higher than the control group. Thus, the results suggested that the multimedia programme training has a great effect on the listening comprehension skills and sub skills of tertiary level dental students.