인형극 활동이 정신지체 아동의 수용언어 및 표현언어에 미치는 영향

The Effect of Doll Play on the Receptive Language and Expressive Language of Mentally Retarded Children

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of doll play on the receptive language and expressive language of mentally retarded children. The subjects in this study were three selected mentally retarded children from special school. After the doll play physical activity and doll-making program were conducted in 10 sessions, the main doll-play program was implemented in 40 sessions. The findings of this study were as below: First, the verbal guidance program by doll play had an effect on enhancing the receptive language skills of the mentally retarded children. Though there was an individual difference between the three children in receptive language age, social age, cognitive ability and environment, Child 1 made a great progress in sentence comprehension, part of receptive language skills in which he was particularly interior, compared to rich expression skills. Child 2 also improved after the experiment, though his change wasn't so noticeable, compared to the other children. Child 3 showed the best change in the comprehension of sentence, tense, adjective, and interrogative. Second, the verbal guidance program by doll play had an effect on developing the expressive language skills of the mentally retarded children. The pretest and posttest showed that Child 1 made the greatest change in every area. Child 2 didn't show much improvement due to poorer cognitive ability and vocabulary skills, but he used subject and verb much more often than in the past that just a ,"vord or a syllable was used. Child 3. didn't make much progress in verbal skills, compared to his cognitive ability and verbal comprehension, but his use of logical and accurate expressions increased a lot in speaking with three syllables or about past experiences. As just three mentally retarded children were investigated as a case study, the findings of this study might not be generalizable. There are some suggestions based on the above-mentioned findings: First, exceptional children 'who lack attention span and learning spontaneity could be helped by doll play to be fully motivated and interactive in class. Therefore, it's needed to develop doll-play teaching programs tailored to different types of instruction and subjects and to provide organized, systematic teacher training. Second, as it's found in this study that doll play not only gives a positive impact on the receptive and expressive language of children but brings other areas change, the impact of doll play on the sociability, confidence and human relations of children should be studied deeply.