engleski

Textbook Materials for the Lower Grades of Elementary School: Do They Conform to the Principles of Plain Language?

Plain language is a concept that spread across Europe half a century ago. It refers to communication based on utterances and structure from which listeners and readers can easily extract and understand necessary information. This study presents the concept of plain language in the context of early education through the analysis of written materials to which pupils attending lower-grade elementary school are exposed. The aim of this study is to analyse phonological, lexical and syntactic characteristics of textbooks for first, second, third, and fourth grade and to link the obtained data with general principles of plain language. For the purpose of this study, a database of written texts was developed – School Corpus of Written Language (Riddys) – with 502 713 tokens. The distribution of graphemes, types of speech, as well as the lengths of words and sentences were analysed. The results show that of the three analysed language components, only the lexicon does not follow the principles of plain language. Too many words that occur only once in all written materials in the first two grades of elementary school do not contribute to faster and more efficient mastering of reading skills.

beginning reading and writing ; elementary school education ; linguistic analysis of textbooks ; plain language ; School corpus of written language (Riddys)

Rad je pisan i na engleskome i na hrvatskome jeziku.