The purpose of this research is to study what kind of influences making books and sharing them with peers as activities after reading. The questions for this research are first, how the book making is composed of; second, what meanings do the students...
The purpose of this research is to study what kind of influences making books and sharing them with peers as activities after reading. The questions for this research are first, how the book making is composed of; second, what meanings do the students give to the book making and sharing activities and their results; and third, how do the book making and sharing activities influence the reading attitudes of the students.
The researcher let the 5th grade elementary school students to voluntarily choose the books they want to read, made them read the books of their choices to the end and continued to instruct them to do book making as an after-reading activity in the school. In addition, the researcher let them share the result product as‘a book I made’ with the peers and paid attention to how such interactions between the authors and readers influenced the students positively.
The research result showed that the activity of planning and making books by the students themselves attributed in increasing their interest in books. The students themselves became the authors and editors of their own books for the peer readers and agonized how to arrange pictures and content in the book as well as made use of pictures to help better understanding of the content. During that process, the students understood the written words and pictures are complimentary to each other, gave additional explanation with pictures on the content hard to deliver by words and delivered the parts hard to understand in the picture by words.
The book making activity that gave the students output of ‘my very own book’ provided them with positive experience like a sense of accomplishment. The positive feedback received in the activity of sharing with the peers gave the students confidence. Such positive stimulations the students experienced through the activities offered them motivations to participate the activities as well as the foundations for them to independently and actively participate the book reading and the book making activities.
During the sharing activity with the peers, the students appreciated the books made by their friends and set up their own criteria to find positive aspects. While browsing through many works, they identified what were the elements that can draw the readers’ interest and attention and applied in their other works. Throughout such a series of processes, the students displayed progressive attitude of learning one another’s strengths. For the case of the upper grade students to whom their peers’ influences are substantial, the mutual interaction among themselves were open and positive. They received helps from their friends without hesitation when needed and also discovered the solutions themselves by watching how others next to them were doing.
This study started with an awareness of how the reading attitudes of the upper grade students of Korean elementary schools are changing negatively and also with an attempt to design an education method that can help improve the reading attitudes of the upper grade students. It definitely has its limits to say the activities of book making and sharing with the peers have improved the students’ reading attitudes or motivations directly. However, it was meaningful to find out that how these after-reading activities provided opportunities for positive experiences to those with low self-esteem and for positive effects created by the positive interaction with the peers.