This study aims at examining how effective the comprehensive, fairy-tale story applied music appreciation activity is for enhancing young children’s musical capacities. It is ultimately expected to provide a theoretically based and practically prove...
This study aims at examining how effective the comprehensive, fairy-tale story applied music appreciation activity is for enhancing young children’s musical capacities. It is ultimately expected to provide a theoretically based and practically proved evidence for kindergarten teachers to consider when they design and administer a music appreciation program to improve kids’ musical recognition and expression abilities.
In accordance with this purpose, study issues are made as follows.
1. Will the comprehensive, fairy-tale story applied music appreciation activity have an effect on the development of young children’s musical recognition capacities (timbre, pitch, rhythm and dynamics)?
2. Will the music appreciation activity with the application of fairy tale stories have an effect on the development of the young children’s musical expression capacities (singing, playing musical instrument, physical expression and musical improvisation activities)?
The experimental group was composed of 20 5 year-old kids from K kindergarten (10 boys and 10 girls), and the control group was composed of 20 5 year-old kids from I kindergarten (9 boys and 11 girls). Both kindergartens are located in In-cheon. The mean ages of the two groups were not significantly different (the mean age of the experimental group was 68.40 months and that of the control 68.16 months.)
Musical recognition capability was assessed by Kim(2004)’s revised version of Park(1984)’s tool, which based on Seashore(1919)’s 「Musical Talent Test」 and Lorton & Walley(1979)’s 「Music Materials for Teaching」. For the assessment of musical expression capabilities, Kim(2004)’s shortened version of 20 items was adopted. The original 89-item-long test, developed by John W. Lorton & Bertha L. Walley(1979) and translated by Choi(1982), is presented in the article, "Recording Skill Development in Music".
The means and standard deviations of the test scores were collected before and after the program, and t test was done to compare the mean differences between the experimental and control groups, using SPSS Window 12.0.
The study results are as follows.
First, the comprehensive musical appreciation activity with the application of fairy tale stories has brought a statistically significant difference in musical recognition capabilities (t=5.327, p>.001). More concretely, there was a significant difference in recognizing the dynamic (t=5.109, p<.001) and rhythm (t=2.088, p<.05), but such difference was not found in the recognition of pitch (t=1.934, p>.05) and timbre (t=1.584, p>.05).
Second, the comprehensive musical appreciation activity with the application of fairy tale stories has failed to bring a statistically significant difference in musical expression capabilities(t=1.723, p>.05). However, a significant change was found when each individual expression area was examined: playing musical instrument (t=2.160, p<.05) and musical improvisation ability (t=1.723, p<.05) was significantly improved while singing and physical expression didn't make a difference (t=1.910, p>.05 and t=-0.636, p>.05, respectively).
The overall results suggest that the fairy-tale story applied, comprehensive musical appreciation activity has a positive effect on the enhancement of young children’s musical capabilities. This comprehensive way of music appreciation will successfully complement the existing method, which has differentiated a concrete and aesthetic ways of music appreciation. This study is expected help kindergarten teachers in their actual education of music appreciation by providing an example of a practically proved music program.