Multimedia based readers theatre and teaching: The Aba municipal council experience

Abstract

The need to give students freedom to interact and participate in the learning process, and make teaching an interesting, attractive and enjoyable endeavour, through the participatory and processcentered teaching method in order to arouse the interest and curiosity of the students, are the problems of this study. This work is predicated on the Multimedia theory of Richard Mayer which asserts that people learn more “deeply” from a combination of words and pictures than from words alone. The research adopted a mix research methodology. Qualitative aspect of the research was done through Participation Action Research (PAR) and content analysis; while quantitative aspects include administering pre and post tests at the beginning and end of the research respectively. The test questions were sprayed to cover five areas of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing and evaluation of Bloom’s taxonomy. Simple percentage mathematical calculation was used to analyze the results. The findings of the study show that there is significant difference in favour of the experimental group taught with multimedia based readers’ theatre and dramatic techniques than the traditional or teacher-centered method. The work therefore recommends that multimedia based readers’ theatre and dramatic techniques be adopted as a major teaching method in our schools because of their intrinsic and extrinsic values of motivating and sustaining the interest of the child which invariably helps the students to develop their imaginative, creative, cognitive, integrative, artistic and disciplinary skills.