언어교육 프로그램을 적용한 유아의 사고 발달에 관한 연구

Abstract

This study was intended to investigate whether the Montessori language education program and the general language education program had a positive effect on the development of children's thinking and find out the right scheme for better language education. For this purpose, it employed a total of 119 children composed of 59 children enrolled in the 'B' Kindergarten operating the Montessori program as the experimental group and 60 children enrolled in the 'H' Kindergarten operating the general program as the control group, both of which are located in Kyonggi Province. This study employed the research instrument that Ju Young-hee made by excerpting the contents based on children is language skills, thinking and cognition from Blank, Rose and Berin's(1978) language test and Peabody's language program(Dunn, Horton & Smith, 1981) and modifying and complementing them to fit the Korean children. Collected data were analyzed to calculate the mean and standard deviation using the SPSS/WIN 12.0, the statistical program, through the process of coding and the t-test was used to make a comparison between the experimental group and the control group. As a result, the following findings were obtained: First, an attempt was made to investigate whether there was a difference in the thinking ability between the children enrolled in the Montessori program and those in the general program. As a result, it was found that the children enrolled in the Montessori program had the significantly high level of thinking ability than those enrolled in the general program, which indicates that the former is more effective than the latter. It was found that there was a significant difference in the subfactors of thinking ability such as the abilities to perceive, analyze, synthesize and reason between both groups. Of them, there was the highest difference in the ability to perceive, followed by the reasoning ability, analytic ability and synthesizing ability. Second, an attempt was made to investigate whether there was a difference in thinking ability between both groups according to gender. As a result, it was found that the children enrolled in the Montessori language education program had the higher level of thinking ability than those in the general program. But the male children showed the significantly higher level of the synthesizing ability than the female counterparts, whereas the female children showed the significantly higher level of abilities to perceive, synthesize, analyze and reason than the male counterparts. In general, the female children showed the faster language development than the male counterparts and got the high result in proportion to language development and thinking ability. Third, an attempt was made to investigate whether there was a difference in the concept and development of language thinking between the children enrolled in the kindergarten operating the Montessori program and those in the general program according to age. It was found that there was a significant difference at the level of p＜.001 in case of children aged 7 years. They showed the positive result in terms of the ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize and reason. The children aged 5 years showed the significant result of the analytical ability at the level of p＜.001. And it was found that they showed a significant difference from the other age groups in the abilities to perceive, synthesize and reason at the level of p＜.01 and p＜.05. This shows that the long-term education of the Montessori program has a greater effect on the increase in the thinking ability.