The Impact of WhatsApp on Learners’ Achievement: A Case Study of English Language Majors at King Khalid University

Abstract

To investigate the effectiveness of e-learning by using a particular mobile application, namely WhatsApp, an empirical study was conducted on sixty undergraduate English language majors at King Khalid University in Saudi Arabia. The objective of the study was to determine whether the levels of motivation, content knowledge and grades of the students (who took the course “Syntax”)-, developed after receiving additional support through WhatsApp apart from traditional classroom lectures. The results showed that the experimental group that got extra support from fellow students and the course teachers through WhatsApp outperformed the students of the control group who studied the course only through traditional method. Moreover, the gap of success rate between the experimental group and the control group is about eighty nine percent with zero failure in the experimental group. The study proved that WhatsApp can be effectively used for providing supplementary support to motivate students to study properly and to get higher grades.