The Role of Creative Art Therapies in Fostering - Research Proposal Example

Immigrant children face major difficulties in terms of communication, emotional expression and sociability, and balancing the cultures of their background and the new environment. In the school context, language acquisition problems can influence the ability of immigrant children to express their emotions, feelings, and thoughts, thereby hindering their growth and development. This research proposal seeks to investigate the use of art therapy to help young immigrant children aged between 5 and 8 years old.

The sample population will include Korean children who have been in New Zealand for less than 2 years since they immigrated from Korea. The final study will utilize outcome-based and hermeneutic approaches to research. The proposed data collection approach will be two-fold. The first set of data will be collected from drawing activities where the researcher will also perform behavioral observations. The second approach will involve verbal interviews between the researcher and the children, their parents, and school teachers.

The study will adhere to the ethical standards of performing research involving human participants, given that this study will involve the contribution of the minors. It is expected that the results of the study will report an improvement in language acquisition, emotional expression, and sociability in immigrant children who took part in the art therapy intervention. When immigrant children are exposed to a new environment, they face individual, social, and cultural challenges of adjusting to their new environment, which can impact their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development.

The manner in which children in primary schools learn a language, be it the first language or the second language primarily influences their success in academic and their social adult lives (Turuk, 2008). Art therapists who help immigrant children have documented the physiological and emotional challenges that immigrant children face due to the difficulties of using the English language, thereby hindering their emotional expression (Rousseau et al., 2004).