Better Learning of Chinese Idioms through Storytelling: Current Trend of Multimedia Storytelling

Abstract

Storytelling plays a vital role to impart a nation’s tradition, cultural beliefs and history to future generation. It is frequently used for the purpose of sharing or exchanging information as it enables the messages to be conveyed to the audience easily. Storytelling acts as a tool of human social interaction and is commonly used in education for learning, explaining and entertaining. Due to the learning effectiveness brought up by storytelling, this study is aimed to compare and differentiate the feasibility of traditional storytelling and multimedia storytelling in motivating and leveraging the non‑native novices’ learning of Chinese idioms. A total of 83 non‑native novices who have attended the Chinese as Foreign Language Course in a local private university of Malaysia were selected as the research sample and divided into two groups. 43 participants were placed in the experimental group and studied the Chinese idioms with a developed multimedia storytelling prototype (MSP), whereas the other 40 participants in the conventional teaching group learned the new knowledge through traditional storytelling. A Chinese idiom test and survey questionnaires were distributed to the non‑native novices to examine their learning achievement and preferences towards the learning approaches. Results showed that the students in the experimental group scored higher and had greater satisfaction towards the Chinese idiom learning than the learners from the conventional group.