Vocabulary development of younger school-age children through innovative aesthetic and embodied learning methods

Lexical development is the most dynamic part of language development and is under the influence of frequent quantitative and qualitative changes happening in our life in various intensity at different periods. At preschool age lexical development depends on the language input, spoken communication and cognitive characteristics of a child, whereas significant progress takes place when a child starts school since the number of acquired words increases to a great extent, word formation knowledge expands and the ability to learn words from the context also improves. According to estimates, a seven-year-old's vocabulary contains 10000 to 13000 words and increases proportionally so that in the third grade it contains about 19000 words and in the fifth grade already about 40000 words. Not just numerous linguistic factors but extra-linguistic as well influence the vocabulary acquisition process. A child acquires most new words reading, both various textbook texts and obligatory literary works. We are equally aware of the fact that the today's children find it increasingly difficult to express themselves and often lack words to articulate their thoughts, desires or feelings. Even though an average primary school child encounters two to three thousand new words per year, only 20% become part of his/her mental lexicon. However, there is no systematic research of the school vocabulary on the corpus of Croatian language and as a consequence there is no assessment or ways of examining lexical competence even though teachers are expected to assess spoken and written texts that students produce with regard to vocabulary richness as well. It is therefore the primary goal of this project to develop and validate younger school children's lexical competence tests and to develop two interventional educational programs to encourage vocabulary development through innovative esthetic and embodied methods, that will be validated not only by students but also by teachers and parents.