The purpose of this study is to examine early childhood teachers’ interests in storytelling activities storied by storytellers and the performances of the activities in Kindergartens. A storyteller in this study refers to an expert who visits a pres...
The purpose of this study is to examine early childhood teachers’ interests in storytelling activities storied by storytellers and the performances of the activities in Kindergartens. A storyteller in this study refers to an expert who visits a preschool and tells old stories to children. With a simple random sampling, a total of 312 early childhood teachers working in Kindergartens and day care centers in Chungcheongnam-do Province had participated in a survey and 246 questionnaires were used for analysis. Using ‘Interest measurement questionnaire’, teachers' interests in stories told by a storyteller was measured. The questionnaire about the performances of the activities in Kindergartens(Chung, 1995, Joe, 1998, and Park, 2001) was revised and used for the purpose of this study. The results of this study showed that early childhood teachers were interested in the storytelling activities storied by storytellers in order of effective interests, indifference, cooperative interests, informative interests, alternative interests, personal interests, and managerial interests. The results of performances of the activities in Kindergartens presented that early childhood teachers seemed to think that the first priority of storytelling was to achieve children’s personal development whereas language learning was not the activities’ main purpose. Furthermore, the most widely-read stories that the storytellers read to children were Korean traditional fairy tales and creative fairy tales while stories related to foreign countries were relatively low. It is discussed how storytelling activities storied by storytellers can give positive and encouraging messages for children’s development and how teachers can utilize the storytelling programs in Kindergartens.