Abstract:

To evaluate the reading comprehension skills of students in their mother tongue is a significant task of researchers around the world. Why is it so important? People use their reading comprehension skills not just during the time of their school education but in everyday situations as well. We read different texts on a daily basis ranging from short texts (recipes, advertisements, timetables) to long texts (articles, short stories, novels). This means that the level of our reading comprehension skills determines our success in various fields of life. For example, having poor reading comprehension skills can negatively affect our achievement at work.

This paper aims to summarize the results of the most reliable reading comprehension surveys among Hungarian primary and secondary school students in Hungary and Slovakia. The main reason for writing this report is to create a starting point for my own reading comprehension survey to get to know the most commonly used methods; types of texts, items and the outcomes of these surveys. In my research I evaluate the reading comprehension skills of Hungarian secondary school students in Slovakia. This report includes a brief description of some reading comprehension surveys (the methodology, the aim of the researches and the main consequences) from 1970 to present days. The initial part of my study includes the results of the reading comprehension surveys in Hungary, as the country regularly takes part in different internal (e.g. the Monitor test) and international surveys (e.g. PISA) which evaluate the reading comprehension levels of students. This way we have an extensive knowledge about the Hungarian students' reading comprehension skills in Hungary. On the contrary, we have little information about those Hungarian students' reading comprehension skills who live in other countries beyond the Hungarian borders, e.g. in Slovakia. In the second part of my study I introduce the results of the PISA survey in Slovakia and the results of Ildikó Vančo's reading comprehension research among Hungarian primary and secondary school students in Slovakia.

Keywords:

reading comprehension, Hungarian students, Hungarian minority