engleski

Influence of obligatory home readings to the first language vocabulary acquisition

Estimations on the size of children's vocabulary are very diverse, which stems from the very nature of a word and dynamic nature of vocabulary. In children vocabulary acquisition lexical spurt and beginning of schooling, i.e. learning how to read can be considered significant milestones. The estimated size of a six- year-old's vocabulary range between 4000 and 6000 words, and school children broaden their vocabulary by 500 and 1000 new words a year. Also, the studies show that while reading an adult can learn 70 new words, while a pupil can learn 16% of the new words in a text (Duan & Da, 2015). In Croatian educational system vocabulary acquisition is not in a focus of mother language classes. Vocabulary growth is purely incidental, i.e. it is result of language exposure and general language development and it is not fostered by vocabulary learning activities. An important part of Croatian language curriculum are obligatory home readings. Due to the length of the texts, as well as their characteristics (literary works, often non-contemporary), it should be considered a significant language input, especially for vocabulary acquisition. Because of that, the aim of this paper was to investigate the influence of obligatory home readings to primary school children first language vocabulary. This research confirms the idea that pupils will enrich their mental lexicon through good choice of readings and systematic encouragement to read which, in turn, will result in better quality of their text production, in both written and spoken form.

children’s vocabulary, home readings, language exposure, language development, Croatian

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