Infancy is a decisive time for infants to develop their language and work power. Therefore, they seem to need to do linguistic expression activities by listening to children's verse and the repeat of syllables and rhythm in the verse. In addition, it ...
Infancy is a decisive time for infants to develop their language and work power. Therefore, they seem to need to do linguistic expression activities by listening to children's verse and the repeat of syllables and rhythm in the verse. In addition, it seems to be necessary for educational institutes for infants to expand the children's verse activity. Therefore, this study was intended to apply children's verse to the complementary linguistics activity for learning linguistic expressions with what is required in the linguistic area-speaking, listening, reading, and writing-and thereby reveal the effects of linguistic expressions activity on infant's phonological awareness ability and word power, which are related to infants' ability to learn language.
To achieve the purpose, the following study issues were set up.
1. How does linguistic expressions ability with children's verse affect infants' phonological awareness ability?
2. How does linguistic expressions ability with children's verse affect infants' word power?
As for study subjects, one class with infants under 5 years old at B child care center, and one class with infants under 5 years old at P child care center, both which are operated by a Songpa-gu district office, were chosen to be assigned randomly to an experimental group and a comparative group. Thus, 40 infants-an experimental group of 20 infants and a comparative group of 20 infants participated in this study.
The test was conducted in order of preliminary test, tester training, prior test, test treatment, and post-test. The test treatment period was from March 7 to April 12, 2012 for 6 weeks 12 times. So, the treatment was made twice a week. The infants in the experimental group did linguistic expressions activity with children's verse twice a week, and the infants in the control group did just the children's verse activity.
In order to examine the increase in the number of words used by infants, this researcher used the Korean standardized picture vocabulary test made by Young-tae Kim, Seon-sook Im, and Hyeon-jeong Bae (1995) on the basis of questions of Pebody Picture Vocabulary Test - Revised, developed by Dunn and Dunn(1981).
As for a phonological awareness ability test tool, this study reflected the test tool used by Seon-ok Kim, Hee-sook Cho, and Jeong-hee Chung (2006), who partially changed the phonological awareness ability test tool used by Seon-ok Kim (2005), consisting of syllable counting, syllable omission awareness, syllable synthesis, syllable discrimination, phoneme counting, phoneme omission awareness, phoneme synthesis, and phoneme discrimination tests.
The results of this study are presented as follows.
First, according to the test as to whether linguistic expressions activity with children's verse affect infants' phonological awareness ability, the experimental group showed 55.05, and the comparative group had 45.75. And t-test indicated that such a difference was meaningful (t=3.67, p<.01). The result meant that linguistic expressions activity with children's verse was more effective for improving phonological awareness ability than the children's verse activity, and that linguistic expressions activity with children's verse helped improve infants' phonological awareness ability.
Secondly, according to the test as to whether linguistic expressions activity with children's verse affect infants' word power, the experimental group showed 88.60,
and the comparative group had 84.05. And t-test indicated that such a difference was meaningful (t=2.08, p<.05). The result meant that linguistic expressions activity with children's verse was more effective for improving word power than the children's verse activity, and that linguistic expressions activity with children's verse helped improve infants' phonological awareness ability. In particular, infants who experienced linguistic expressions activity with children's verse increase their word power more than infants who experienced only children's verse activity.
On the basis of the study results, this researcher came to the conclusion that human beings are instinctively eager to make self-expression and deliver their own thought and emotion to others through the self-expression. Therefore, the linguistic expressions activity with children's verse, which help understand conversation partners and circumstances and properly express one's thought and emotion, can be effective for developing infants' phonological awareness ability and word power.