This study purposed to analyze the effects of cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books on young children's social competency and language expression ability and to provide basic materials for the educational and effective appl...
This study purposed to analyze the effects of cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books on young children's social competency and language expression ability and to provide basic materials for the educational and effective application of cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books.
The research questions for this study are as follows:
1. What are the effects of cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books on young children's social competency?
2. What are the effects of cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books on young children's language expression ability?
The subject of this study were a total of 40 young children who consisted of 5 year-old young children at one class from the P kindergarten and 5 year-old young children at one class from the M kindergarten, which is similar to SES, and P & M kindergartens located in the G metropolitan city. They were randomly assigned to either experimental or comparative group.
Research tools used in this study were Social competency Inspection tool, which was prepared by Yeong-ja Lee, Jong-sook Lee and Ok-seung Yang(1988) through translating the Vineland Social Adaptive Behavior Inspection developed by Sparrow, Balla & Cicchetti(1985), and was revised by Eun-sung Park(2008) for measuring young children's social competency, and the Language Expression Ability Inspection tool developed by Jang, Young-ae(1981) for measuring young children's language expression ability.
The research procedure consists of preliminary test, preliminary experiment, pre-test, experimental treatments, and post-test. The experiment was conducted for 8 weeks from May 13 to July 4, 2008. A pre-test was given to test the homogeneity between the groups in terms of social competency and language expression ability. The result showed no significant difference between the experimental group and comparative group. As for the experimental group, cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books were offered 3 times a week for 5 weeks, total 15 times. As for the comparative group, individual story creating activities with wordless picture books were offered a total of 15 times during the same period.
To examine the effects of this study, we collected the results of the pre-test and the post-test, and made comparative analysis of the data through t-test using SPSS 15.0 program.
The results of this study were as follow:
First, according to the results of analyzing difference in social competency between the experimental group that had cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books and the comparative group that had individual story creating activities with wordless picture books, improvement in social competency was significantly higher in the experimental group. In addition, for 'social activity', 'cooperativeness', 'social participation and autonomy' and 'leadership' among the sub-factors of social competency, cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books were more higher than individual story creating activities. It means that the cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books had positive impacts on enhancing the young children's social competency.
Second, according to the results of analyzing difference in language expression ability between the experimental group that had cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books and the comparative group that had individual story creating activities with wordless picture books, improvement in language expression ability was significantly higher in the experimental group. In addition, for 'the number of words', 'the number of sentences', 'consistency of content', 'connection of content' and 'creative expression' among the sub-factors of language expression ability, cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books were more higher than individual story creating activities. It means that the cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books had positive impacts on enhancing the young children's language expression ability.
Consequently, the results of this study suggest that cooperative story creating activities with wordless picture books is more effective teaching methods for improving young children's social competency and language expression ability, and worthy of being applied in the field of early childhood education.