Study: The impact of reading on spelling, meaning and collocation

This study performed on 240 Macedonian school children learning English looked at how passive exposure (reading, listening) to words affected 3 variables (spelling, meaning, and collocation)

collocation expresses how a word is ordered in between other words, what words is it often next to, and in what context might you find it.

In the study students were tested once before and once after on all 3 variables. In between they went through a guided reading of the entire "A Little Princess" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. A relatively long text of about 65000 words.

The students as a group were also tested on a random page to ensure that they already knew at least 95% of the words. This being the magic number for context learning to take place.

The study made the following key observations.

The Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient for the correlation between the word frequency in the text and the relative gains was 0.30 for spelling, 0.45 for meaning and 0.41 for collocation, which confirms the importance of the number of encounters of the word for their acquisition.

In other words, passive exposure to the words in context does lead to learning. And the more frequently the word comes up, the higher the chance of learning it.