초등학교 1-4학년 다문화가정아동의 연결어미 형태인식 특성

Abstract

Recently, the rapid increase in domestic multicultural population is leading to apprehension that there is a lack of proper language stimuli for children from multicultural families, and a growing necessity of proper evaluation and intervention. Accordingly, active related studies are in progress. This study is intended to examine morphological awareness of connective endings, which are specially important morphemes in Korean language, in three groups: typical children from culturally diverse families(TCD), language impaired children from culturally diverse families(LCD), and typical children from non-culturally diverse families(TND). Morphological awareness is one of metalinguistic skills to think of and be aware of morphemes consciously and control morphemic structures. Morphological awareness is regarded as a crucial element to evaluate and intervene in linguistic and reading abilities of school-age children. This study is, therefore, focused on investigating morphological awareness of connective endings in the three groups of lower graders(1st and 2nd grades) and middle graders(3rd and 4th grades), who don’t have cognitive difficulties, but have different cultural backgrounds and linguistic abilities. This is to understand the differences in morphological awareness of connective endings depending on multicultural backgrounds or linguistic skills, and the developmental changes in morphological awareness of connective endings depending on grades.

The research questions are as follows : A. What are the differences in morphological awareness of connective endings among the TND group, the TCD group, and the LCD group depending on linguistic skills and cultural backgrounds of families? B. What are the differences in morphological awareness of connective endings between lower graders(1st and 2nd grades) and middle graders(3rd and 4th grades) of each group?

This study targeted a total of 78 children: 29 typical children from culturally diverse families(14 lower graders and 15 middle graders), 20 language impaired children from culturally diverse families(10 lower graders and 10 middle graders), and 29 typical children from non-culturally diverse families(14 lower graders and 15 middle graders). Nonverbal intelligence of all the subjects was 80 or above that is in the normal range and they had no visual, hearing, neurological, and emotional disorders. The subjects were placed in a delayed language development group and a normal language group, based on receptive vocabulary capabilities. The morphological awareness test of connective endings used in this study was to transform the verbs given to suit sentences, using connective endings. This test contains 13 semantic relations of connective endings and total 65 questions and had its content validity verified. For the test, children were asked to watch the PPT screen and listen recorded files.

The study finding showed that the TCD group of lower graders had significantly lower morphological awareness than the TND group, even though receptive vocabulary was controlled. But there was no significant difference between the groups of middle graders. Also, the LCD group of both lower and middle graders had significantly lower morphological awareness of connective endings than the TND group. This means that although multicultural backgrounds influenced morphological awareness of connective endings when they were in the lower grades, vocabulary, as a linguistic factor, had bigger influence than multicultural backgrounds in the middle and higher grades. In addition, morphological awareness of connective endings significantly increased in all the three groups, as they advanced into higher grades. This demonstrates apart from the influence of the vocabulary level or multicultural backgrounds, children’s morphological awareness of connective endings improved more significantly, as they moved to higher grades. In conclusion, judging from this result, it is supposed that morphological awareness of connective endings is influenced by several factors, such as growth of linguistic skills, improved understanding of tasks, and improved reading abilities.