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. Thus, the research of the relation of obligatory home readings and vocabulary acquisition in Croatian is still lacking. The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of obligatory home readings to primary school children first language vocabulary. The target group are children in Grades 3 and 4 (age 8-10, N= 300) who are independent readers and whose home reading assignments are larger texts (children novels). Computational linguistic analysis of two obligatory home reading texts will be conducted to set up the target vocabulary for the research. Several groups of vocabulary will be investigated: less frequent non-abstract words, frequent abstract words, archaic words and polisemous words. The knowledge of target words will be investigated pre- and post- obligatory home reading by vocabulary test designed for this purpose. In conducted analysis quantitatively and qualitatively aspects of children vocabulary growth will be investigated. The proposed research will shed more lights to the nature of vocabulary acquisition in Croatian and it will have important implication to mother language teaching practice.

language learning, vocabulary, language density, communicative competence

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