The Relationship of Productive Vocabulary and Reading Habits of Primary School Students

In the last twenty years, difficulties in verbalising one’s own thoughts have been noticed more and more frequently among primary school students. With the adoption of the Curriculum for the Croatian language subject (2019) within the Language and Communication domain in each grade, i.e. age group, one outcome is related to the acquisition of vocabulary, and vocabulary enrichment is one of the tasks of the Literature and Creativity domain as well. Bearing in mind that “knowing a word” implies knowledge of its grammatical structure, written form with regard to the spelling rules, its meaning and functional knowledge that implies its use in context, this process is complex and requires a special approach. Since the development of vocabulary is mostly influenced by reading itself and by students’ reading habits, it is important to encourage students to read at the primary school age, but also to develop their communication skills and knowledge. In order to examine productive dictionary knowledge, a survey was conducted with the fifth grade elementary school students. In the experimentally selected class, the Test of Communication Skills (Aladrović Slovaček 2012) was conducted, in which lexical competence, i.e. the knowledge of productive vocabulary and its use in context, was examined. Apart from that, students also filled out a questionnaire about reading habits, and the data were interconnected. The confirmed thesis states that students who have better reading habits have better results in the language competence tests and have more developed lexical competence. Moreover, it was established that cultivating reading habits helps the development of the lexical competence, which is also a predictor of later academic achievements

Active listening · Curriculum · Extensive reading · Spelling · Vocabulary · Language and Culture · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Second Language Acquisition and Learning

• Čitanje i rječnik

  Open Access•Marta Santrić, Ana Ćavar et al.•Croatian Journal of Education -…•2019

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