The purpose of this study is to find the effect of physical expression-focused language intervention based on children's poems on the improvement of metaphorical understanding of the children with mild mental retardation.
The subjects of this stud...
The purpose of this study is to find the effect of physical expression-focused language intervention based on children's poems on the improvement of metaphorical understanding of the children with mild mental retardation.
The subjects of this study were 2 boys and 1 girl in their fifth grades with mild mental retardation, this study carried out preliminary investigation, baseline, intervention steps, and maintenance steps from January 2 to March 23, 2012.
Considering the language age of the children, the children's poems used in the intervention programs were selected from the ones you can easily follow and remember because they are short and have many repetitive phrases and rhythms. Those are the poems that are frequently selected and read mainly by infant educational institutions or schools, and if the poems are long with more than 3 verses, only some parts of the poems in less than 3 verses were used without discontinuing the contents of the poems.
The 3 children conducted the activities to familiarize themselves with each one poem at each session of a total of 12 sessions except the baseline period.
In the introductory part of the session, they were made to conduct hand-play activities or to sing the relevant songs to arouse their interests, and in the main part, the poem plates were shown to them and the relevant physical movements were also demonstrated to them while the titles and subjects of the poems were being read to them. Next, they were made to change their movements while freely talking between themselves, and then they carried out dynamic play activities by repeating their physical movements and children's poems in the form of leading and chanting the songs in unison. At the end of the session, they were made to say what the titles of the poems were and which contents and movements of the poems they felt the greatest interest in.
The result of this study showed that all of the 3 children showed lower rate of forward reaction in the baseline step, and with the slow tendency of increase after the intervention, showed about 30∼50% rate of increase in the final evaluation step compared to baseline study step. So this study came to the conclusion that the gesture-focused language teaching based on the children's poems will have the positive effect on the improvement of metaphorical understanding of the children with mild mental retardation.
The children with mild mental retardation use many of the shorter and simpler words than normal children and have particular difficulty in using and understanding the implicative, figurative and metaphorical languages, but in this study, the use of children's poems is considered to have had much effect due to the unique characteristics of children's poems such as the cadence, implication, creative imagination and lyricism, and the secret functions of the language. Further, the physical expression-focused language intervention through movements proved to be more effective educational medium to the children with poor mental abilities rather than the attempt to approach them only with the voice or writing.