This study was intended to investigate how Young Children's speaking activities with traditional children's songs affect their linguistic expressions and work recognition ability. The study issues necessary to achieve the study purpose are presented a...
This study was intended to investigate how Young Children's speaking activities with traditional children's songs affect their linguistic expressions and work recognition ability. The study issues necessary to achieve the study purpose are presented as follows.
1. How does Young Children's speaking activity with traditional children's songs affect their linguistic expressions ability?
2. How does Young Children's speaking activity with traditional children's songs affect their word recognition?
To address the study issues, the following process was performed in this study.
First, in this study, speaking activity with traditional children's songs was based on the types of speaking activity suggested by Jong-hoon Kim (1995) and Chun-sik Park (1992) in 'looking for traditional children's songs' (Yang-ja Hong, 2000) and 'songs of a game called Keryong Keryong' (Hae-moon Pyeon, 2008).
Secondly, the study subjects were 30 Young Children under 5 years old at S child care center in Seoul. They were divided into an experimental group of 15 Young Children and a control group of 15 Young Children. The test had been conducted from March 5 to May 3, 2012 over the last 9 weeks. It was performed in order of 2-week preliminary research and prior-examination, 7-week test treatment, and 2-week post-examination.
Thirdly, an investigation was made before and after the test treatment in order to look into the effects of this study. As a test tool for linguistic expressions ability, only the linguistic expressions ability part of the linguistic ability test (vocabulary power, understanding of stories, and linguistic expressions ability) for Young Children between 4 and 6 years old, developed by Young-ae Jang (1981), was applied. As a test tool for word recognition ability, 'meaningful word recognition project' and 'non-meaningful word recognition project', developed by Seong-in Hong (2001), was utilized.
Fourthly, SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) WINDOWS 18.0 was used to analyze the data collected in this study. For calculation of basic data, frequency and percentage, technical statistics of a mean and standard deviation were used. After prior-test and post-test were conducted on the experimental group and the control group, each mean and standard deviation of the two tests were counted. And then, t-test was performed to investigate if any increment showed significant difference.
The results drawn from the above procedure are summarized as follows.
First, according to the test as to whether Young Children's speaking activity with traditional children's songs affect their linguistic expression ability, the experimental group had 64.60, and the control group had 54.87. And t-test revealed that such a difference was meaning (t=3.38, p<.01). It meant that speaking activity with traditional children's songs was more effective for improving Young Children's linguistic expression ability than only the activity of traditional children's songs. And, regarding each sub-factor, the number of words (t=3.23, p<.01), the number of sentences(t=2.06, p<.05), contents association(t=2.84, p<.01), contents match(t=2.21, p<.05), creative expressions(t=2.28, p<.05) were all meaningful.
Secondly, according to the test as to whether Young Children's speaking activity with traditional children's songs affect their word recognition ability, the experimental group had 33.53, and the control group had 27.47. And t-test revealed that such a difference was meaning (t=2.82, p<.01). It meant that speaking activity with traditional children's songs was more effective for improving Young Children's word recognition ability than only the activity of traditional children's songs. And, regarding each sub-factor, meaningful word recognition ability (t=2.69, p<.05), and non-meaningful word recognition ability (t=2.76, p<.05) were all improved.
It was found that Young Children did speaking activity with traditional children's songs, and with speaking and writings, expressed their thinking, and faced and utilized new words, and used various vocabularies, and made expressions through speaking, writings, and gesture. Also, it was found that they interacted, exchanged opinions with their peers and teachers, and freely expressed their feeling and thinking in the natural process of learning and singing traditional children's songs, and therefore, such a process was found to affect the improvement in their linguistic expressions and word recognition ability.
Traditional children's songs can easily be song and shared by anyone, since they include traditional emotion and rhythms. In particular, they can readily be changed and utilized by Young Children, for there are a lot of repeated words, echoic words and mimetic words in the songs. Therefore, speaking activity with traditional children's songs can be utilized as an effective education program for developing Young Children's language. For the reason, teachers should make their efforts in researching and developing a systematic educational curriculum. And it is expected that such a curriculum will be actively utilized in educational sites for Young Children.