Abstract:

Good reading comprehension skills are a basic need in the modern world. It is not only one of the most important areas of native language competence, but also one of the essential pillars of today’s information-centred society and can be called the intellectual capital of society. In the 21st century, education focuses on improving the reading comprehension of students all over the world, intending to develop the best possible reading comprehension skills.

The topic of our research is the assessment of reading comprehension skills of seventh-graders in primary schools with Hungarian as the language of instruction in Slovakia. This research aims to assess how the nature of text types affect the reading comprehension of students. The target group was seventh-graders from primary schools with Hungarian as the language of instruction in Eastern, Central, and Western Slovakia.

A total of 315 students took part in the survey. We aimed to conduct a representative survey so that 10% of seventh-graders of primary schools with Hungarian as the language of instruction in Slovakia took part in the survey. The reading comprehension test to assess reading comprehension skills included three different types of text – narrative, expository, informative – and a total of 21 questions. Most of them were open-ended questions requiring short or long explanations.

The analyses of the results divided into text types show that explanatory texts proved to be the easiest to understand and the informative text the most difficult for the examined age group. The results indicate that students were able to understand better those types of texts that they had already learned about at school. The exact interpretation of the informative text type was a problem, which is thought-provoking, as this type of text occurs most often in different areas of everyday life.

With the results of this research, reading comprehension can be studied in a complex way, so that not only is there a constant emphasis on the importance of reading comprehension in education, but with the knowledge of an accurate diagnosis, actual development is possible.

Keywords:

Slovakia Hungarian, reading comprehension, text type, key competence.