The influence of drama-based pedagogical techniques on younger school children's vocabulary development

Abstract

Any educational content acquisition, the linguistic one included, has its initial and its final phase. At the beginning of education, a child’s source language is most often based on the organic idiom, whereas the target language refers to the level of acquisition of the standard language idiom at the end of primary education. Various linguistic and extralinguistic factors determine the formation and the level of acquisition of the target language and consequently vocabulary development, i.e. lexical competence. Since primary school children are exposed to a great variety of different media today, it has been observed that their communication is lacking on different levels and their vocabulary is becoming inadequate. Therefore, it is crucial, especially in the mother tongue (Croatian) teaching, to use various techniques that will not only help develop communicative skills, e.g. listening, speaking, reading and writing, but also enrich students’ lexis in written and oral mode. Accordingly, experimental research is conducted in the third and fourth grade of primary school. In one class, Croatian language content is presented to students with the help of drama techniques during a two-week period, whereas another group is taught using traditional methods. Both groups are tested twice: before and after conducting the experiment. The results are analysed in the SPSS programme for statistical analysis. It is confirmed that drama-based techniques significantly improve vocabulary development and that students who had two weeks of experimental teaching show better results in understanding deeper meaning of words in various contexts. The richness and broadness of their vocabulary improved as well by measuring of lexical density and diversity.

Keywords

• language acquisition, drama techniques, vocabulary, Croatian language, learning of Croatian