This research was aimed to understand young children's language expression in drawing activity using picture books and to know how the language expression is related to drawing activity through a quality study.
Participants for this study were 4 chi...
This research was aimed to understand young children's language expression in drawing activity using picture books and to know how the language expression is related to drawing activity through a quality study.
Participants for this study were 4 children of age 5 and 1 child of age 4 from a kindergarten at B elementary school in an rural area, E Goon, Gyeongnam. This study lasted for 16 weeks from the first week of April 2007 to the third week of July.
The analysis was based on children's drawings, recording and observation charts and through the exhibit of the data, the detailed aspect of young children's language expression was categorized and generalized.
Collected data were categorized according to story construction, imagination, empathy, use of knowledge and information, realistic description etc and the results are as below.
First, the children expanded their own thoughts, feelings and past experiences and created totally different stories from the books given.
Second, the children freed themselves within the pictures and the language and expressed the phenomena and the objects they did not experienced in the past in unique and creative ways. They did not restrict themselves within the limit of time, space, size and shapes. That is, when it came to the context they created their own imaginary characters and backgrounds and expressed themselves through very unique and creative stories.
Third, they purified their own feelings and emotions through the characters and the objects from the books in expressing the story. In other words, the children's imagination did not stay in the story but drew out their subconscious feelings, that is, negative and positive feelings, their own experiences, family situations, etc. and through empathy they purified or expressed their emotions.
Forth, the children constructed the storyline using the knowledge and information from the books. They painted a drawing from chapter 1 to chapter 4 and then were able to construct the causal relationship and prediction between the chapters.
Finally, the children showed the ability to remember and describe the plot, storyline, main idea, theme, characters, background, etc realistically. That meant they contained the comprehensive understanding of the books apart from their imagination or creative expression.