The effect of multimedia instruction for Chinese learning

In Taiwan, lectures are commonly used for younger students to learn their own language, which is traditional Chinese. Passively listening to lectures has led to this group of students making such mistakes as forgetting strokes and word meanings, combining phrases to create incomprehensible blurs of information, and switching radicals with phonetic characters. Thus, the rationale of this study is that better and longer lasting Chinese learning results will occur when a combination of well-designed texts, audio, graphics, animation, and hands-on practice are employed. A multimedia system with computer-based courseware in combination with added, assistive technologies including sound equipment, digital boards, and pens was developed based on this rationale. This study used a treatment group who used the system and a comparison group who received lectures. The subjects were 41 second graders in a southern city in Taiwan and all of them received the same pretest, immediate posttest, and the delayed posttest. Even though some of the differences between the two groups did not reach statistical significance, the results revealed that the treatment group consistently performed better than the comparison group in almost all the areas of competencies in both posttests.