Fairy tales, idioms and proverbs in the education of students with learning difficulties

Facilitating the understanding of figurative meanings with the help of fairy tales

Abstract

Proverbs have been around since ancient times (Sirisaka, 1890). The key to their survival over centuries or even millennia is that wise men have always adapted them, given them a new guise, and mostly passed them on to younger generations as stories, making them easier to understand (Papp, 1984).
Nowadays, we can observe that the use of idioms and proverbs is increasingly disappearing from language use. This may be due to the constant change of language, the depletion of vocabulary, lack of use, and difficulties in understanding arising from more rigid thinking. In our empirical research, we sought to find out whether we could facilitate the understanding of the figurative meaning of idioms and proverbs in fourth-grade children with learning difficulties by presenting them in the form of fables (educational stories).
For our experiment, we created an easy-to-understand, illustrated storybook, each story of which deals with Hungarian proverbs. The stories are unique in their format, as both the literal meaning and the figurative meaning are included in the story. We also apply the Meixner method (Hargitai, 2010) and the typographical recommendations suggested by Mária Gósy (Gósy, 2008). We worked on the tales with the children during special Hungarian lessons, using cooperative techniques. Our measurement tool was a quiz consisting of ten questions with four answer options each, which the children wrote twice. The first time was during the first meeting, and the second time was after the text processing lessons were completed.
The pupils' results showed improvement in their understanding of the meaning of the stories they had studied. The children were enthusiastic and interested throughout the experiment. Another positive observation was that the proverbial stories aroused their interest enough to ask their family members about the meaning of other proverbs.
Keywords: proverbs, learning disabilities, fairy tales, easy to understand, visual aids.