The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of integrated poetry activities on the verbal ability and empathy of young children in an attempt to help improve the language ability and empathy of preschoolers.
The research questions were posed...
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of integrated poetry activities on the verbal ability and empathy of young children in an attempt to help improve the language ability and empathy of preschoolers.
The research questions were posed as follows:
1. What influence do integrated poetry activities exert on the language ability of young children?
2. What influence do integrated poetry activities exert on the empathy of young children?
The subjects in this study were 40 young children who were selected from two different kindergartens in south Jeolla province. 20 young children who were selected from a kindergarten attached to Y elementary school made up a multi-age experimental group, which included three and 17 kindergarteners at the age of 4 and 5 respectively in Western age. And a 20-member multi-age control group was selected from the other kindergarten attached to B elementary school, and there were four and 16 kindergarteners in the control group who were respectively four- and five-year-old in Western age. The experimental group participated 12 times for six weeks, twice a week, in integrated poetry activities related to life themes and in optional activities that concerned their interest. For the same period of time, nursery- rhyme activities related to life themes, poetry memorizing activities and drawing activities were provided to the control group. The instrument used in this study was partially selected from Park Hye-ju, Gwak Geum-ju and Park Gwang-tae(1996)'s Korean version of K-WPPSI. The selected categories were common sense, comprehension, vocabulary, commonness and sentence. To assess the empathy of the young children, Kim Jeong-ae(1999)'s Picture Test was adopted, which modified the inventories of Gwak Hyeon-ju(1995), Bang Seung-hee(1997) and Hwang Eui-myeong(1997) that were based on Jacquelyn Mize and Garry Ladd(1988)'s study. In this test, several picture situations were presented to the young children, and they were asked questions about empathy to evaluate their response. The collected data were analyzed with SPSS program, and statistical data on mean and standard deviation were obtained. In addition, t-test was used to make a comparative analysis of the two groups to look for any possible intergroup gaps.
The findings of the study were as follows:
First, the experimental group that was engaged in the integrated children's verse activities scored significantly higher in language ability than the experimental group. It seemed to imply that the integrated poetry activities had a good effect on boosting the language ability of the young children.
Second, the experimental group that took part in the integrated poetry activities scored significantly higher in overall empathy than the control group. By empathy subarea, the experimental group that was exposed to the integrated poetry activities got statistically significantly higher scores in play disturbing, but there was no significant gap between the two in isolated situations and bullying.
In conclusion, the findings of the study suggested that the integrated poetry activities exercised a good influence on enhancing the verbal ability and empathy of the young children. An intensive application of integrated poetry activities is consequently expected to facilitate the improvement of young children's language ability and empathy.