APPLICATION OF POWERPOINT PRESENTATION IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING AND PEDAGOGY: ITS EFFICACIES AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS IN CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION

Abstract

Thanks to the advancement of information technology, the scenario of language teaching and learning has got unprecedentedly and tremendously changed over the recent years. Traditional classrooms are giving way for smart classrooms. Technological applications have had enormous impact on the arena of education and knowledge sharing, particularly on language learning and pedagogy. At this juncture, this paper attempts a study on the application of Power Point Presentation software in the context of English language teaching and learning. Today, PowerPoint, as an important part of Computer-Assisted Language Leaning (CALL), is a much widely-used presentation software for it allows a language teacher to present his/her lesson with coloured texts, images with simple animation, sound and much more. As such, this study aims at bringing out the salient benefits of applying PowerPoint Presentation both for English language teachers and learners, along with shedding lights on its efficacies and classroom implications in the light of some literature reviews and a classroom action research, questionnaire survey and post-test.Following a literary review in this regard, a group of 40 English Language adult learners at a spoken English centre in Malappuram, Kerala, India are selected as subjects of this study in order to conduct the classroom action research and the questionnaire survey. The 40 subjects are divided into two groups of 20 each, one is the experimental group and the other one is the control group. The experimental group is taught some particular grammar lessons using PowerPoint Presentation and the control group is taught the same lessons in the traditional method such as lecturing or just oral presentation. A likert scale questionnaire method asking about the learning experience is applied to collect data from the experimental group. Majority of the experimental group hold positive opinion about the use of PowerPoint Presentation for teaching English. And a sample post-test is also administered out for each group and the result shows that there is a big difference in the means of the two groups and that the subjects who are taught using PowerPoint Presentation Software demonstrate better performance than the control group.The paper concludes after a discussion on the results from the survey stressing the fact that PowerPoint Presentation is a powerful pedagogical tool in English language classroom and the language instructors are advised to try to apply this technology in effective manner so that the actual learning takes place in the class, that’s too in quite interesting way. The paper does not suggest a complete shift from traditional method to PowerPoint Presentation in a language classroom for traditional method has also its own advantages and benefits as first Indian Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru rightly said: “Change is essential but Continuity is also necessary” (Synthesis is Our Tradition, 1959)