Content analysis of the text level in creative tales for young children in the 「Teacher's guidebook for the 3-5 Nuri curriculum」

The purpose of this study was to analyze the text level of creative tales for young children in the 「Teacher’s guidebook for the 3-5 Nuri system」 according to the children’s age. The subject of this study were 216 creative tale texts in the 「Teacher’s guidebook for the 3-5 Nuri system」. The ‘Qualitative Measures Rubric for Literature Text Complexity’ (CCSS, 2010) was used for analyzing the text level of the qualitative factors of the creative tales. For the data analysis, the frequency and percentage were reported. The findings of this study are as follows. First, regarding the text level of creative tales in the teacher’s guidebook for the 3-5 Nuri System, the text levels for the majority of the creative tales for three-, four-, and five-year-old children were not appropriate for their age. Especially, for each age, about 20% of the text was at a level for children two years older than that of the target age group. Second, in the analysis of the tendency in the text level based on four criteria that were used to assess the age level, i.e. text structure, theme, clarity of the language and level of conventionality, and background knowledge, different characteristics of the creative tale texts were found according to the age. Most of the creative tale texts for three-year-old children had an age-appropriate text structure; most of the creative tale texts for four-year-old children had an age-appropriate clarity of the language and level of conventionality, and most of the creative tale texts for five-year-old children had an age-appropriate text structure and theme. By contrast, a high proportion of the remaining criteria for the text level of the creative tales were not appropriate for the target age groups.