The Influence of Textbook Texts on the Early Lexical Development in Croatian Language

The language of textbooks should be a mediator and not an obstacle in acquiring knowledge and developing communicative skills in students. This role is achieved primarily by choosing and forming coherent and clear language means, appropriate for the age and cognitive abilities of the textbook recipients. The paper studies the vocabulary of textbooks for lower elementary education, as an important element of clarity and comprehensibility. The quantitative method is used to establish the number of autosemantic words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and numbers) in the textbook for Croatian, which is then compared with textbooks for Maths and Science. The data are compared with the lexical corpus of early language discourse (age 7 to 10), obtained by previous research and by analysis of students’ works. The aim of this paper is to investigate and evaluate the level of adequacy of the lexical corpus of textbooks, to identify the factors influencing the acquisition, cognition and reception of the text (such as the number of words, complex words, foreign and unfamiliar words, denotations and connotations of words). Further, the importance of adapting textbooks to the cognitive abilities and communicative skills of students in the early period of language learning and teaching is pointed out. The right choice of lexical and semantic relations together with the appropriate syntactic structures will aid bridging the gap between the language of textbooks and the language skills of elementary school students