Diary writing is the most common type of writing for students but it is still burdensome to students because it requires writing everyday, In particular, students with written expression disabilities have many difficulties in the process of stimulatin...
Diary writing is the most common type of writing for students but it is still burdensome to students because it requires writing everyday, In particular, students with written expression disabilities have many difficulties in the process of stimulating and structuring thoughts to write. Previous researches emphasized that the use of mind map activated students'thinking and improved the quantity of ideas. Thus the present study was designed to examine the effects of diary writing training through mind map on the written expression and diary writing attitude of elementary students with written expression disabilities.
For this purpose, twenty from 5th and 6th grade students with written expression disabilities were selected at an elementary school in Incheon, and were divided into an experimental group (n=10) and a control group (n=10). After the pre-test, the students in the experimental group were taught the structure of diary, how to find topics and how to order mind map for 15 sessions (40 minutes per session), but those in the control group were taught the structure of diary and how to find topics for only 1~2 sessions and then had ordinary diary writing education after-ward.
The results of this study are summarized as follows:
With regard to writing expression,
1. Students with written expression disabilities who had mind map activities showed more improvement in the contents of writing than those who had ordinary diary writing.
2. Students with written expression disabilities who had mind map activities showed more improvement in the length of writing than those who had ordinary diary writing.
3. The students in the experimental group who had mind map activities showed more improvement in the accuracy of spelling and punctuation marks in diary writing than those in the control group, In terms of the accuracy of grammar, significant differences were observed between the experimental group and the control group in the use of particles and subject predicate agreement but not in the sequence of tenses, the use of predicative, and the use of conjunctions. That is, the students in the experimental group who had mind map activities showed more improvement in the use of particles and subject predicate agreement than those in the control group who had ordinary diary writing.
With regard to the diary writing attitude and frequency in students with written expression disabilities,
4. The experimental group who had mind map activities showed more improvement in general diary writing attitude than the control group who had ordinary diary writing.
5. The experimental group who had mind map activities showed more improvement in response to diary writing and the process of diary writing than the control group who had ordinary diary writing
6. The experimental group who had mind map activities showed more improvement in the frequency of diary writing than the control group who had ordinary diary writing.