The Effect of Home Literacy Environment on Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Skills in Preschool Children

Objectives: This study examined which factors in the home literacy environment significantly predicted children’s receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. Methods: A total of 45 dyads of children and parents participated in this study. A questionnaire was used to investigate the home literacy environment (Greenberg & Weitzman, 2014), and standardized receptive and expressive vocabulary tests (Kim et al., 2009) were administered to assess the children’s vocabulary skills. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was calculated to examine the correlation between children’s vocabulary skills and home literacy sub-items, a stepwise multiple regression analysis was conducted to verify the predicting factors for the children’s receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. Results: The results showed that receptive vocabulary scores were significantly correlated with the parents’ use of questions and child’s reading attitude during book reading; whereas expressive vocabulary scores were significantly correlated with the frequent and repetitive book reading, and children’s attentive reading attitude during book reading. Children’s positive and active participation was a significant factor explaining receptive vocabulary scores. There were no factors that significantly explained children’s expressive vocabulary scores. Conclusion: This study’s results suggest that children’s active participation in book reading was the most important factor predicting children’s receptive vocabulary skills, and confirmed that it is vital for parents to positively encourage children to participate actively while reading a book.