Lexical analysis of primers

Sa？etak The role of primers is to support literacy development, lexical enrichment and acquisition of the new knowledge. Therefore, the content and language incorporated in primers are important since they ensure successful reading and encourage child`s further learning. The aim of this study are lexical analyses of three primers approved by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport. The text and instruction from primers are analysed separately. The number of lemmas, types and tokens is calculated, as well as the number of low frequency words. The low frequency words are selected according to the Beck`s criteria: words that appear less than 12 times in primers are selected as low frequency words. It is well known that a great number of not commonly used words negatively influence on text comprehension and lexical development. The results show that most of the words in analysed primers are generally insufficiently represented and not distributed in various contexts. Frequency and context distribution are one of the prerequisites for word learning. Data gained from this study indicate that these two prerequisites have to be included in primers in order to ensure word learning and successful reading