I. Introduction.
A. Context and Background.
B. Research Purposes.
C. Importance of the Research
D. Research Questions.
II. Literature Review.
III. Methodology
A. Introduction
B. Research Design.
C. Participants.
D. Data collection.
E. The procedure of Analyzing the Data
F. Study Limitations.
IV. Results and Discussion
A. Results and Data Analysis.
1. Students Data:
2. Teachers Data:
B. Discussion.
1. Research problem restatement.
2. Major Findings.
3. Results interpreting.
4. Study limitations.
5. Recommendations for implementation and future research.
6. Conclusion.
V. Concluding Chapter.
VI. References
VII. Appendix B: Students’ questionnaires (English Version)
VIII. Appendix C: Students’ questionnaires (Arabic Version)
IX. Appendix D: Teachers’ questionnaires (Only English Version)
This Monograph is dedicated to
My hero, My first love, and My Mother (Fatima SAADI).
You sacrificed a lot for me, you invested everything in me. I’m very grateful to you, and words can’t express how much I love you.
My Proud Motivator and Father (Lahoucine STAIR).
You also believed in me; you were always proud of me. You didn’t not only treat me as a son, you treated me like a friend.
My Supervisor and Professor, Prof. Dr. Mohamed GARMAH.
You enlightened my way and motivated me by convincing me that my research can be the first of its kind.
My brother Mohamed STAIR
(Well, you mostly just made fun of me)
My Sister Yasmine STAIR
You both believed in me and kept encouraging me
My late grandfather El Alem SAADI
You always believed in me since I was a little kid… and always predicted that I will be a teacher.
Acknowledgment.
I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my funders and supporters, my parents, for supporting me all the way and providing me with all the financial and emotional support I needed to work in a suitable atmosphere.
Words cannot express my gratitude to my professor, guide, advisor, and proofreader, Prof. Dr. Mohamed GARMAH. This research wouldn’t go the right way without your instructions and guidelines. I also thank him for the times he’s been strict with us, and the times he motivated us. Additionally, I thank him for every link and material he provided us with.
I am also grateful to my host teachers Mr. Abdelkhalek ZEROUALI (Semester 5 – Observational Training), and Mr. Ali BOUHMALA (Semester 6 – Practical Training) for sharing their knowledge, advice, and instructions.
Special thanks to the administrations, teachers, and students of both Zarktouni Highschool and Ibn Sina Highschool for contributing and easing the process of data collection for me. They provided me with the essential help that I need to finish this Thesis.
Lastly, I would like to thank all my friends for reviewing and proofreading my work. I also thank them for keeping me in good company while working in the cafe.
Objective: This study aims to intercept both Moroccan teachers’ and students’ opinions on the use of Multimedia Projectors and Blackboards in English language teaching and find out if Multimedia Projectors are more time-saving and creative than Blackboards or not. It is also established to look upon the challenges facing both and how comfortable are teachers and students with the use of Multimedia Projectors.
Methods: To accomplish the objective, I delivered two different questionnaires to my participants, one for teachers and the other for students. Each questionnaire contains both closed-ended and open-ended questions.
Results: Both teachers and students admitted that they are with the use of Multimedia Projectors and nearly all of them stated that they find them more time-saving and creative than Blackboards. our participants also stated that they are comfortable and face no obstructions using Multimedia Projectors. They also provided me with various suggestions on how to improve the use of MPs, while teachers provided me with the challenges facing both MPs and Blackboards.
Conclusion: In brief, Multimedia Projectors are also more useful if used in parallel, but more than Blackboards in any suitable task. Their biggest challenge is the fact that Moroccan high schools can’t provide them.
Keywords: multimedia projectors (MPs), blackboards, visual aids, English language teaching (ELT)
T he Use of Multimedia Projectors in English Language Teaching Classrooms: A Time Saving and More Creative Method Than Blackboards – The case of Moroccan High schools.
Blackboards were and still are effective tools in the process of Teaching. As they are used to visualize the information for students, they are also essential in defragmenting the teacher’s ideas. However, the reign of Blackboards has come to an end, when Multimedia Projectors joined the competition. These projectors provided incredible fluency in the usage of visual aids in multiple fields including education.
Multimedia projectors are highly useful when used in Language teaching classes. English as the current global language has become easy to teach with the aid of technology, especially the visual aids provided by Multimedia projectors. Another advantage to be considered is the existence of various data sources that provide the required media that facilitate the learning of the language and makes it more interesting and enjoyable.
Time has moved and evolution made a way for technology to be adapted to the vivid process of teaching and learning. Technology has always proven to be an aspect that makes people’s tasks and daily lives easier, time-saving, more comfortable, and sometimes more creative. As for the educational field, it also started developing the moment educationists took the risk of involving technology in their sensitive duty. Starting with printers the field of education moved all the way to reach a chronological point, where Multimedia Projectors started entering the competition with blackboards, as a visual aid.
A projector, image projector, or multimedia projector is an optical device that spots visual media such as images, videos, or documents onto a solid surface or a projection screen, making it works like a borderless TV. The concept of projectors starts with the natural phenomenon, Pinhole Imagery, that was used by our primal ancestors who were peering through animal hides and watching lights that danced as they entered through tiny, likely unexpected holes. Knowledge of these pinhole images is believed to be as old as humanity’s desire to create a shelter made for hiding. In the 17th century, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) invented the Magic Lantern, an image projector that produces light, that pierces through a lens to spot and enlarge photographs or painted pictures on a white wall. To be used, the Magic Lantern requires the photographs or the images to be printed and carved on a glass panel, oiled papers, or transparent films. In the early 1900s, the Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, logician, and engineer Leonhard Euler invented Opaque Projectors, which came out as the new shape of visual projectors. Its main concept worked by using very strong light rays that illuminate objects from two sides, and light reflects off the targeted part or item and projects on a screen. Nowadays, this type of projector is still used by artists, as it gives a mimicked 3D-like visual of the object. In the late 1990s, Digital projectors made their way and started what is called ‘ The Data Show’. These new types of projects were the first generation of projectors that provide visual aids of objects through the use of digital databases as a source of projection items and started the possibility of projecting digital pictures. Nowadays, Modren Systems’ projectors are the most known and recognized type of projectors, thanks to their nearly-unlimited ability to take any pairable digital device, storage drive, or network as a digital source of data to project any kind of digital files (videos, images, documents…) on any solid surface, making it as a borderless invulnerable screen. Currently, these smart and developed multimedia projectors are being widely used in different fields including education. As an invader to the field, Multimedia Projectors have proven to be a strong competitor to old means of teaching similar to blackboards.
Numerous researches were conducted to study the specifics and benefits of Multimedia Projectors in the field of education, especially English Language Teaching. Yet this research will fill the gap that previous research left, which is the comparative part between Multimedia Projectors and Blackboards, in terms of Creativity and Time-Saving in the field of English Language Teaching. However, this research will focus on studying present-day English Teaching classrooms, the ones that use only blackboards and the ones that use both blackboards and projectors, and compare the educational effectiveness of every part of its English Language learning process. In addition, this research will also focus on the pros and cons of both tools and spot the light on the challenges that face both teachers and learners. Multimedia Projectors and Blackboards are used in teaching all types of subjects, but this research will focus generally on some of these subjects and mainly on English Language Teaching classrooms. Finally, this research will also suggest improvements that can be applied to the use of Multimedia Projectors while being used in class.
This research is highly important, not only to state clear facts about these two methods but also to be a reference that can redirect people in future studies and ease their way in digging for more details on different subtopics. Once this research gets started, it will clear the vagueness of the opinions of both students and teachers on the usage of Multimedia Projectors over Blackboards. To determine the final opinions, this research will study the simplicity of use, the time-consumption, abundance of resources, availability of devices, attention-catching, creativity of use, and overall effectiveness.
After the research is done, the audience will have a clear idea of whether Multimedia Projectors are more creative, time-saving, and effective than Blackboards or not, and how teachers/learners deal with the use of both. The research will also provide the audience with supporting shreds of evidence that are determined by post-conducted studies using data collected from a local high school. Those studies will be the key element to settle the scores between the two methods and open the way for further research.
- Can the use of Multimedia Projectors be more creative than Blackboards in English Language Teaching classrooms?
- Are Multimedia Projectors more time saving than Blackboards in English Language Teaching classrooms?
- When it comes to English Language Teaching classes, do teachers/learners prefer Multimedia Projectors or Blackboards? how comfortable are they with the use of Multimedia Projectors?
- What are the challenges facing both Multimedia Projectors and blackboards? and what suggestions can teachers/learners provide to improve the benefits of using Multimedia Projectors?
Since the dawn of school, blackboards played an essential role in the process of teaching. It was always used as a stationary surface that grabs the learner’s attention, as the teacher explains a lesson while transcribing his thoughts or the lesson’s main ideas to a written sample on the board, waiting for students to copy them in their notebooks while listening to the lecture in the same time. As time passed, technology in general developed, and optical devices in specific evolved to a practical level, which lead to the invention of a digital version of visual projectors known as Multimedia projectors. This kind of developed visual device will quickly overthrow blackboards, thanks to its time-saving utility and unlimited creative use of all kinds of visual files, such as videos, images, and documents. Nowadays, classrooms that don’t contain a multimedia projector will find the processing of teaching less beneficial and more time-wasting than classrooms that have one. Nowadays, the more we realize how English is the most dominant language in the world and how important it is for people to learn, we deduce that language teaching classrooms are in the most need of multimedia projectors, because of their learning approaches that are mainly built on visual aids, audio-based dialogues, and more media-consisted materials.
A study by (Amin et al., 2018, pp. 62–76) investigated The Benefit of Using Multimedia projectors in an English Language Teaching Classroom. In this study, the participants are ten (10) English teachers from ten famous schools, colleges, and universities, who taught English for more than six years. In addition, fifty (50) students also participated in the data collection process of this study. The data collection process was done using different methods. The ten English learning classes were surveyed in three weeks. The collected data was detected by a definite class inception checklist. Then, ten experienced members of the English faculty were interviewed using readymade questions for five days. Finally, the data was accomplished in one day with the students. These research questions were covering, the benefit of multimedia projectors in language teaching, the teacher’s perception of it, the advantages for learners, and the hindrances faced by the teacher. The ten surveyed teachers stated that using multimedia projectors provided them with various audio substances (Phonemic charts, songs, discussions, etc.), and visual substances (Pictures, video clips, movie clips, documentaries, etc.). In addition, Projectors were also used to give students the correct pronunciation, test listening skills, and perform follow-up activities, supported by audio clips. On the other hand, some teachers stated that using multimedia projectors distracted their students from the main topic of the lesson. However, when the students were asked, they all gave the same opinion, that multimedia projectors assist the process of learning for them and make it easy to grasp the information on language learning in a lively way, and reduce their nervousness while brainstorming or stating answers.
PowerPoint is also an important software when talking about multimedia projectors' usage in language teaching. A study by (Craig & Amernic, 2006) investigated PowerPoint Presentation Technology and the Dynamics of Teaching. The results of this study proved that students like to be taught using PowerPoint, thanks to its novelty and the availability of printed handouts. This study also stated that PowerPoint presentations are entertaining, they guarantee enhanced clarity and aid recall of subject matter. (Craig & Amernic, 2006) also introduced what they call “PowerPoint Culture”. A term that divides into three main aspects. Power and ideology: focus on how the use of PowerPoint itself carries some gestures that force the audience to witness an academic stand of the presenter that has the potential to be a “powerful producer of knowledge.” (Rose, 2004). Cognition and Psychology: in this part, the study confirms the existence of not only the visual side of PowerPoints but also a psychological side where you have to understand your audience, how they think, and be able to explain their perceptual, cognitive, and emotional reasons. Orality, Visuality, and Literacy: teaching settings have been characterized by a fine balance between two forms of learning: orality and the printed word (Postman, 1993). While teachers focused on the visual side of learning, they also let room for orality to guarantee the best results in learning. They “Have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized” (Postman, 1993, p. 17). In the end, the study motivates teachers to use PowerPoint saying “All users of PowerPoint should respond to Postman’s (1993) call and pause to reflect about any new technology, such as PowerPoint, and how it affects, however imperceptibly, their engagement with what and how they teach”.
A study by Noha Halwani (2017), deals with Visual Aids and Multimedia in Second Language Acquisition. The main research question was posed which is “How can visual aids improve English language acquisition in reading and writing for beginner ESL high school students?”. For the data collection, N Halwani asked a language teacher to teach the first ten minutes with no use of multimedia projectors and compared the student’s attention in these ten minutes to the rest of the course that consists of multimedia projectors usage. Afterward, Noha chose a lesson randomly, it was about Halloween, and tried to teach it without the use of a multimedia projector and then teach it using it. In addition, since the teacher couldn’t approve examining the whole class, Noha was able to survey 5 students on how much they enjoyed the traditionally-taught lesson compared to the one that contained visual aids (pictures and videos). As a result of this study, it was shown that while depending only on documented materials and written information on the board, students were just quiet and copied what was written on the board in a boring atmosphere. While using visual aids, the survey results showed that 90% of the students preferred learning using visual aids as it boosts their self-confidence, comprehension, and concentration.
After confirming the adaptation of the audio and visual aids provided by the multimedia projector. Educators started to wonder, whether to replace traditional blackboards with multimedia projectors or not. The previous issue drove researchers to conduct multiple studies that investigate the revolutionary idea of replacing the whole system of how lessons are taught.
A study by Giselle Corbeil (2013) investigated the main question titled the following, “Can PowerPoint Presentations Effectively Replace Textbooks and Blackboards for Teaching Grammar? Do Students Find Them an Effective Learning Tool?”. A total number of one hundred and five (105) university students participated in a study that lasted two years. in this study, students' first language is English, and they are going through a false-beginners of French as a second language to be taught. During those two years, students in the first year used the textbook, Ensuite (Thompson & Hirsch, 1998). In their second year, they started using Du Bout de la langue au bout des doigts ( De Fontenay & Legoux, 1999 ). During these two years, students were learning grammatical structures in two ways. The first method used is the traditional textbook + blackboard. At the end of the previously-mentioned method, students took questionnaires to examine how effective it is for them. The questionnaires results were quite impressive since students answered, that they think the use of this traditional method was explicitly stated, clearly served, and followed by more enriching examples. Some of the students stated: “I like the examples and how each rule was laid out.”, “I like the page with the different adjective endings in masculine plus feminine forms.”. another group was studying the agreement and the placement of adjectives, with the use of PowerPoints. The following students were also examined in the same way and the results were very shocking since they also show how much they appreciated the use of PPTs and how clearly, they grasped the lesson. Nearly all the students agreed that the most helpful part was the examples supported by visual effects. Some students also stated: “I really liked the PPTs. What helped me most was that it was visual and I could see how the endings changed.”, “The visual aspect was a great help in learning. It is better than verbal.”. in a comparison between the results of the two methods, G Corbeil concluded that perhaps, PPTs are as effective as blackboards + textbooks, but not mainly more effective. The only limitation posed can be the fact that downloading PPTs outside the class can be more time-consuming than opening textbooks for revision since people are not used to it that much.
Nowadays, the idea of replacing blackboards with IT, PowerPoints, or visual aids that are presented using Multimedia projectors is not new. Indeed, it was already researched 22 years ago by (Szabo & Hastings, 2000) in their study “Using IT in the undergraduate classroom: should we replace the blackboard with PowerPoint?”. One hundred and fifty-five (155) male and female students participated in this study. Fifty (50) students in the first year, fifty-four (54) students in the second year, and fifty-one (51) students in the third year. First-year and third-year students took all their lectures, in one of their modules, in PowerPoint format during the first semester of the Academic year 1998/99. These modules were `Motor Learning' for the first-year students and `Strength, Power, and Endurance in Sport and Exercise' for the third-year students. Second-year students took only one lecture in `Social Psychology of Sport and Exercise’ using PowerPoints to measure whether opinions differ among regular exposition of PowerPoints and those who experienced it once. Two types of studies were applied to the participants. The first study was a simple questionnaire given to the students to measure how effective they think of PowerPoint usage. The second study was comparing their exam marks on the modules taught using PPTs, to the marks of the previous generation that had traditional learning ways. As a result, the whole 155 students, including second-year students who experienced PPTs once, agreed on the superiority of PPTs and multimedia projectors over the use of traditional ways. In addition, the average grades of the students 1 week after PPTs lectures unbelievably surpassed the grades of traditional overhead lectures (by the average score of 75-78% vs the average score of 49%). A third study was applied to the students, using a questionnaire that contains developments students want to see in PPTs. The high participation rate in this study and the outcome of the questionnaire proved that students are willing to learn more modules using Multimedia projectors and PowerPoints.
However, (Ahmed, 2018) conducted his study ‘Multimedia Aided Language Teaching: An Ideal Pedagogy in the English Language Teaching of Bangladesh’. The participants in the study were a group of thirty (30) teachers. eight (8) teachers from elementary and junior high school, seven (7) secondary or intermediate teachers, and fifteen (15) college teachers in Bangladesh. To get an authentic picture of whether multimedia-based English language teaching will be effective and relevant in the perspective of Bangladesh, qualitative research was conducted by A Kawser. The participants were delivered a questionnaire containing five different questions that indicate how comfortable teachers are with using visual and multimedia-based aids in English teaching, and whether they face obstacles or not during the usage. The first question was to indicate the knowledge of langue taught by using multimedia in a real-life classroom environment. 46.67% claimed that they have sufficient knowledge, 23.33% have moderate knowledge while 13.33% do not have sufficient knowledge, 10 percent have poor knowledge and 6.67% showed indifference. The second question was whether students face obstruction in learning English as Second Language (ESL) through multimedia or not. 43.33% of the teachers stated that their students feel at ease in learning English, 26.67% do not feel any obstruction while 13.33% think their students face few obstructions, 10 percent show indifference, and 6.67% support the traditional system. The third question was to decide whether multimedia gives a sufficient breakthrough to the traditional language teaching-learning in Bangladesh or not. 56.67% think it gives sufficient breakthrough, 13.33% give moderate, 20% give no breakthrough, 6.67% give a little breakthrough, and 3.33% show indifference. The fourth question measures if teachers are comfortable with the use of multimedia or not. 40% are comfortable, 26.67% are not entirely comfortable, 16.67% are comfortable with the conventional system, 10% have disregarded it, and 6.67% show indifference. The fifth question wants to confirm if multimedia is a practicable and pragmatic concept in the English language teaching arena of Bangladesh or not. 53.33% think it’s a practicable and pragmatic concept, 16.67% think it is not, 20% think it is, moderately, 6.67% show some drawbacks, and 3.33 show indifference. At the end of the study, it was concluded that the use of multimedia in English teaching classrooms gave teachers a positive impression and made the process of learning easier and more creative for students.
The previously reviewed researches sum up those opinions towards the use of PowerPoints, visual aids, and multimedia projectors differ in many aspects from the simplicity of use, the reliability of sources, and the availability of devices to the effectiveness itself. However, the majority of opinions, found in the results of qualitative research reviewed above, proved that both teachers and students are willing to dig deeper into the world of using technology in education (especially in language teaching), and most individuals of both groups are finding it easier and more flexible to use PowerPoints, visual aids and multimedia projectors in the process of learning. Eventually, the given researches still light up the way to an uncovered side of comparison between the traditional ways and the technologically-developed ones, which is the creativity of both ways and the time consumption. Further research can be done to settle the score between the two methods and prove which one is more creative and which one is time-saving to conclude the overall effectiveness.
Our research problem is determining whether multimedia projectors are better than blackboards when teaching English Language and whether they save time and provide more creative learning or not.
To determine such claims, a study has to be conducted in an educational field, specifically an English-teaching class, to focus on both students’ and teachers’ positions. In this study, the point that must be cleared is how both multimedia projectors and blackboards are beneficial in all aspects to both parties (students and teachers) and then decide whether the problematic claims are true or false.
In this Methodological section, I will expose the research design, the participants, the data collection, the procedure of analyzing the data, and the study limitations.
As stated in the research purpose, the purpose of this study is to observe the use of both Multimedia projectors and Blackboards and to decide which one of them is better and what are their pros and cons, depending on the data collected from two separate Moroccan high-schools and concerning the stances and opinions of both students and teachers. To find the required data, qualitative-quantitative research needs to be conducted to gather the opinions and views on the use of both methods to settle scores between the two and clarify all the details around them, concerning English Language Teaching, in the case of Moroccan high school students and their teachers.
In order to determine the result of our comparisons and clarifications, I chose thirty-four (34) participants as my research subjects. These participants are both teachers and students of two Moroccan high schools. For Ibn Sina high-school, I picked two (2) teachers of the English Language, five (5) students from the common core, five (5) from the first-year baccalaureate, and five (5) from the second-year baccalaureate. For Zerktouni high school, I also picked the same number of teachers (2) and the same number of students (15). These teachers are all using Multimedia projectors for most or some of their courses and have experience in using them, and the students are all exposed to the use of multimedia projectors and have experience learning with them.
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As mentioned before, to observe both multimedia projectors and blackboards, the opinions of both students and teachers towards them will need to be posed. In order to accomplish the previously mentioned goals, both qualitative and quantitative approaches of Data Collection will have to be initiated. Since the data that needs to be collected is opinions, attitudes, suggestions, and pre-designed answers, two kinds of questionnaires will be delivered to both teachers and students of both high schools. The questionnaires will contain closed-ended questions with multiple choices, balanced rating questions, and ranked questions. In the end, will also provide one open-ended question.
Students will take a questionnaire that contains student-centered questions. First, they will answer questions that collect their personal information, such as names, scholar level, school name, study stream, and their level in the English language. Second, they will answer questions about whether they are with or against the usage of technology in general in the process of learning. The next questions will specifically deal with their opinions and attitudes towards using Multimedia Projectors in English-Teaching classes. The last section of questions will contain both comparative questions between blackboards and multimedia projectors, and an open-ended question.
Teachers will take a different questionnaire, which also starts with personal information, such as names, the high school they teach in, and how many years have they been teaching. Then, they’ll also answer questions related to their positions towards the use of technology in general in education and whether they think it’s beneficial or not. In addition, they will fill out a section of questions that scales their knowledge, experience, and fluency of usage of multimedia projectors in their classrooms and whether they face challenges or not during usage. The next questions will also seek their opinions and attitudes towards the use of multimedia projectors in teaching English-Language. Another section of questions will cover their observations of their students’ interactions with the use of multimedia projectors. The last section of questions will determine the differences between the use of multimedia projectors and the use of blackboards then, it’ll provide a suggestive open-ended question.
Since the collected data is both qualitative and quantitative, the data must first be inspected to omit any off-topic answers, corrupted papers, or mess-answered questions. Next. We need to extract the pre-designed answers from the closed-ended questions to determine their percentages and rates on every question for both parties (students and teachers) then classify them and put the answers taken from ranked questions in order. After finishing those phases, we’ll use how frequently every answer was used to determine the overall opinion and position of both students and teachers in the use of multimedia projectors and back it up with answers extracted from the comparative section to decide whether those projectors are better or not.
The open-ended questions will first be filtered to determine what answers can be used in the study and what answers go against the terms or privacies. Then, we will use those final answers as an addition to what people specifically think of both ways, and what suggestions they have to make the best use of both. For teachers, they will have two extra questions asking about the challenges they face while using both multimedia projectors and blackboards.
Although the study is designed to gather enough information from both students and teachers on how they deal with multimedia projectors and blackboards, and what they think about both, it will still face a few obstructions. The first obstruction is the fact that some students and teachers can be lazy or just don’t want to answer open-ended questions. A second one is the unseriousness of some students while answering these questions. the third obstacle is going to be the fact that some teachers and students are not exposed to multimedia projectors, or they refuse to use them which will make their answers biased. Finally, unlike the quantitative part of the questionnaire, the qualitative part will be more time consuming and hard to benefit from since it offers personal ideas of different individuals with different ideologies and from both parties, teachers (users of the studied methods) and students (receivers of the usage).
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