The role of the lexicon of school books in school achievement

Abstract

A key constituent of reading comprehension and learning ability is vocabulary. Mapping the children’s vocabulary will help consciously planned developing work. In this study research on vocabulary development will be presented, and then the importance of the role of vocabulary in understanding the lexicon of texts will be introduced. The research (Nagy 2004, Nation et al. 1997) shows that knowing the 5-6000 most frequent words is sufficient to understand everyday texts, because they cover almost 95 per cent of texts. The 2008 research of the ‘Vocabulary net’ department shows that the schoolbook families of various publishing houses contain 40 thousand words from 3rd to 8th grades. According to the 2004 examination by Nagy (2004), children in the 4th grade can recognise 4000 words on average by reading, which rises only to 4500 by the 10th grade. It can be seen from this data that an average child can hardly keep pace with the new terminologies/lexicon of the schoolbooks. Finally, a series of books will be presented whose lexicon is in line with the children’s hypothetical vocabulary, and its aim is to teach the repetitive words of the texts by using the sight word technique (but not as the method for teaching reading but as a level of reading ability, see Juhász 2019).