The Connection between the Reading Habits and Richness of Vocabulary of Croatian Secondary-School Students

Sa？etak Along with spoken communication, reading is the most important means of indirectly mastering vocabulary. The primary goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that how much someone reads (reading volume) positively influences the richness of their vocabulary. The study’s secondary goal was to determine some of the possible factors of influence on reading frequency or volume. Two hundred students enrolled in the third year of secondary school at three schools in Zagreb participated in the study. For the purposes of an empirical investigation, a research instrument (questionnaire) was designed to check the participants’ knowledge of the meanings of lexemes excerpted from works of literature from the secondary-school curriculum. In addition, data on the reading habits of the participants were collected by means of a survey. At the primary level of investigation, the study investigated the relationship between the percentage of correctly identified meanings of lexemes and the average volume of reading literature and determined that the students who on average did more reading also recognized the meaning of more lexemes. At the secondary level of investigation, the study looked into the dependence of average reading volume on other variables: exposure to stories and fairy tales during childhood, love of reading (reading pleasure), reading comprehension, and the average reading volume of the participants’ parents. The results indicated a statistically significant positive correlation between average reading volume and the first three of these four variables