Abstract:

The latest results of Slovak learners achieved in PISA measurements referring to reading literacy inspired language professionals to focus on the development of reading strategies of primary and secondary school students. The intensity of introducing a variety of reading programmes result in a number of external measurements of reading comprehension, conducted on a regular basis in the final years of primary and secondary education.

Applying an action-oriented approach based on developing receptive strategies, language teachers in Slovakia encourage their students to develop skills that will enable them to get, retrieve and share information from written texts. This philosophy coincides with the essence of reading literacy that includes the ability to extract the relevant information from texts through comprehension and use it in real-life situations, reflecting on the content or relevant pieces of information. Due to this perception of reading abilities, PISA defines reading literacy as a complex competency with multiple facets.

Slovakia participates in PISA measurements on a regular basis. However, the achievements of Slovak learners have a decreasing tendency. As Slovakia uses a variety of external measurements of reading comprehension, we decided to analyse different language tests that might reveal the quality of reading skills students are able to achieve at different stages of their education – in the final years of primary education and in the final school-leaving examinations in several languages. For these purposes, we focus on data achieved in several language tests in Slovak and Slovak as a second language as well as across languages at different levels of proficiency.

Our study is based on an analysis of different language tests, produced and evaluated externally to achieve objective data. A comparison of item analysis has enabled us to discover problems Slovak students are faced with and to provide a list of recommendations for language teachers in order to improve quality of teaching as teaching and student learning are tightly interconnected.

Keywords:

Assessing reading skills, item analysis, improving students´ reading strategies.