The purpose of this thesis is to seek and conduct effective ways to teach literacy for five-year-old children and to examine the reactions of the children, teachers, and parents towards the methods. The subject matters to discuss are as follows:
1....
The purpose of this thesis is to seek and conduct effective ways to teach literacy for five-year-old children and to examine the reactions of the children, teachers, and parents towards the methods. The subject matters to discuss are as follows:
1. What are the effective ways for implementing literacy education for five-year-old children?
2. What reaction do the children, teachers and parents have towards such effective ways?
This research was conducted on 4 teachers, the children’s parents, and 58 five-year-old children attending Yeonkot and Nancho class at NaRi Kindergarten affiliated with a university located in Seoul, Korea. Studying the subject matters, the literacy curriculum for the five-year-old class was carefully examined, the literacy test was taken, and the survey comprehending parents’ perceptions and home training of literacy education was conducted and analyzed.
The data for the research were collected between December 12th, 2009 and June 7th, 2010, through whole class reading activities, and group activities assigned to literacy abilities. The research was carried out in a process of recognizing issues of five-year-old children’s literacy education, searching for solutions, applying and evaluating the first and second implementation orderly of the methods. All the activities instructed by the researcher and teachers were recorded and reconstructed by transcription. Moreover, researcher’s and teachers’ journals, teacher's interview data, and parents’ surveys were analyzed by subject matters according to classification and encoding.
The results from the research are as follows.
First, to apply effective methods for literacy education for the five-year-old children, existing reading and writing activities were selected and reorganized according to their appropriate needs and life subjects.
Also, an efficient method was devised to determine the literacy levels of each child since there were huge gaps among children’s literacy capabilities. On the first application of the methods, reading activities for the whole class, group reading, and writing activities assigned to children’s literacy abilities were carried out.
A detailed plan involved selecting picture books, reading the books for the whole class, conducting intensive and expanded activities after reading books, grouping children in accordance to their literacy abilities, assigning group reading and writing activities according to children’s literacy abilities, and sharing activities among groups.
Upon evaluating the first application, the necessity of adjusting the methodologies was raised in that they had pressure on teachers to give lessons.
Additionally, group activities according to children’s literacy levels were constrained by time and space. It was also necessary to teach children to recognize consonants and how to write.
On the second application, the group activities assigned to children’s literacy abilities were modified and carried out reflecting the assessment of the first application. Concrete methods involved reading picture books for the whole class through several classes, regrouping the children with regards to time and space constraints, conducting group reading and writing activities combined with the writing instruction for consonants and notation recognition, and continuous sharing and integrating activities among groups and other related activities.
Second, by analyzing the reactions of the five-year-old children to the effective methods for implementing literacy education, their interest in reading and writing activities increased and children from relatively low literacy ability group showed more interest in written letters. With regards to teachers’ reactions, their understanding of accommodating teaching methods to each literacy level of children increased; they acknowledged various reading and writing approaches; and they were willing to continue applying the methods. In reference to parents’ reactions, they were satisfied with the reading and writing education and showed interest towards the literacy education.
This thesis emphasizes the importance of individual literacy abilities of the five-year-old children by identifying their literacy skills, awakens the needs to direct children reflecting their interest in literacy education, and also designs an effective means of group activities to accommodate the literacy level of the children for teachers.
On the basis of this thesis, I anticipate to support teachers to manage effective literacy education by providing specific ways to conduct literacy education for each children's literacy abilities.