The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of story making activities using traditional fairy tales on children's language and perspective-taking Abilities. The research questions for this study were as the following:
1. What are the eff...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of story making activities using traditional fairy tales on children's language and perspective-taking Abilities. The research questions for this study were as the following:
1. What are the effects of story making activities using traditional fairy tales on children's language ability?
2. What are the effects of story making activities using traditional fairy tales on children's perspective-taking ability?
The subjects of this study were five years old children who were at classes of two different kindergartens attached to G and M elementary schools located in G city. They were a total of 50 children and randomly divided into 26 children in the experiment group and 24 children in the comparison group. The experiment group was engaged in story making activities after listening to traditional fairy tales, and the comparison group was performed drawing activities after they listened to traditional fairy tales. The experiment was performed 2 or 3 times a week, total 15 sessions during 7-week peroid.
In order to measure the children's language ability, the study used a language test from the Korean-Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence(K-WPPSI), which was adapted to Korean context by Hea-Won Park, Geum-Joo Kwag, and Gwang-Bae Park(1996).
To evaluate children's perspective-taking ability, perspective-taking ability test modified and supplemented by Su-ki Lee(2005), Hyun-Ok Shin(1996) based on the study by Hudson, Forman, and Brion(1982) was used. The study procedure consists of preliminary test, preliminary experiment, pre-test, experimental treatments, and post-test. When pre-test was conducted to see if the two groups were equivalent, they were considered equivalent since there appeared no significant difference in language and perspective-taking Abilities.
The results of pre and post tests between experiment group and comparison group were analyzed with t-test, using SPSS 12.0 program.
The results of this study were as followings:
First, the experiment group that was engaged in story making activities using traditional fairy tales made significantly higher progress in language ability than the comparison group that was engaged in drawing activities using traditional fairy tales. In the fields of 'common sense', 'vocabulary', and 'commonness', which are the subfields of language ability, the experiment group showed a significantly higher improvement than the comparison group.
However, in the fields of 'comprehension', 'mathematics', 'sentence', there was no statistically significant differnece between two groups.
Second, the experiment group that was engaged in story making activities using traditional fairy tales made significantly higher progress in the perspective-taking ability than the comparison group.
There was a significant difference in three subfields of perspective-taking ability; strangers-intention prospect, strangers-thought prospect and strangers-emotion prospect.
Therefore, story making activities through the activities among the infants in the subgroup had positive effect on children's perspective-taking ability.
In conclusion, this study found that story making activities using traditional fairy tales had positive effects on enhancing the young children's language and perspective-taking Abilities.
Therfore, the result of this study implies that story making activity using traditional fairy tales is worth utilizing at early childhood education programs as an appropriate and meaningful teaching-learning methods to improve language and perspective-taking Abilities.