The purpose of this study is to check if art therapy programs utilizing children's story can
help the linguistic skills of school aged children with developmental disorder.
Study subjects are selected among the developmental disorder children of school age who
attend the 00 language academy located in Pusan. The entire number of subjects are 8, and they are divided into the controlled group of 4 and the experimental group of 4. The art therapy
program lasted from November-2005 to October-2005, meeting twice a week, each time 60
minutes of duration, and total 85 sessions.
SPSS-WIN 12.0 is used for data analysis, in that ANCOVA based on pre-test as covariance
is employed to raise verification of difference between the two groups.
Conclusions obtained from the study results are as follows.
First, art therapy with children's story is effective to improve receptive linguistic competence
of the school aged children with developmental disorder(F=36.429, p<.02).
Second, art therapy with children's story is effective to improve expressive language skills of
the school aged with developmental disability(F=31.808 p<.01).
Through the obtained results, derived conclusions, and revealed limits of the study, some
suggestions can be generated as follows.
First, a greater number of subjects from not only the children of school age but also preschool
children as well as adolescents must be selected for comparative studies to generalize the effect of art therapy with children's story on language development.
Second, it is desirable that art therapy programs with children's story should be designed in a
way that the programs can create good effects on the lack of both language skills and other
skills necessary for children's development.
Key Words : Children's Story, Art Therapy, Development Disorder, Linguistic Competence