Abstract:

Reading in a second foreign language is often trained only to a limited extent in the Slovak educational context, though this language competence is one of the key skills needed in everyday language use. In teaching the language, the teacher often focuses only on basic grammar and vocabulary aspects of the language taught. This situation has a negative impact on learners’ ability to read with relevant comprehension, whether factual or artistic literature, which is also reflected in the results of international testing. Understanding foreign language texts needs to be trained and then measured, as reading comprehension still belongs to the basic skills of an individual. The paper deals with the phenomenon of reading comprehension in the second foreign language associated with the creation of an adequate measurement (testing) tool for reading comprehension in French and German. We focused our research on secondary school learners in Slovakia, with the expected A2 level of foreign language proficiency according to CEFR. For this purpose, an adequate measurement tool was created for a second foreign language containing diverse texts and tasks for them. In the paper we analyze the basic principles and criteria of the tool development for measuring reading comprehension competence with regard to the further direction of research in the field of developing reading literacy in a foreign language. Subsequently, we test the reliability of these tools in order to have a credible tool for assessing the learners' ability level of the relevant language competence.
The research goal is therefore to find out the reliability of the reading comprehension measurement tool for German and French. Based on the measured reading comprehension results, we proceeded to item analysis to determine item quality using variables such as item difficulty, item sensitivity, item point biserial correlation, and distractor attractiveness. The research sample consisted of 250 secondary vocational and grammar schools learners in Slovakia, with the expected A2 level of foreign language proficiency according to CEFR. We used the method of statistical processing Cronbach alfa and Kuder Richardson coefficient. The results showed a relatively good reliability of the created research tools, based on which we can decide whether an individual is able or unable to read foreign language texts with good comprehension in the appropriate language at the expected level.

Keywords:

Reading comprehension, second foreign language, testing tool, measurement.