Abstract:

Reading, despite the involvement of modern information technology, remains the essential skill in the acquisition of knowledge and expertise, as well as practical and professional skills. The demand for a high level of reading literacy in the current globalized world is constantly growing as people have to work with text information in new and more complicated ways. Internationally and nationally, it, however, appears that more and more students and adults have problems with this skill.

The paper looks at reading literacy from multiple aspects. Reading literacy (i.e. reading comprehension) includes working with different types of texts, the impact of e-literature on text processing, the relationship between form and content of the text as determinants of its understanding and they belong to topical areas constantly reflected in professional research journals and publications. Furthermore, it also assumes links with international researches and studies (PISA, PIRLS) dedicated to testing reading literacy which showed just average achievements of the skill developed with Slovak students compared to international results. The latest international researches are mostly focused on finding predictors of reading comprehension, in particular, working memory, rapid naming, phonological awareness, creating and defining the model of a successful fluent reader, but none of them focuses on detection of interaction of linguistic and cognitive variables, the detection of the causes of (mis)understanding, the examining of intervention in the reading comprehension process.

Having this in mind, the team of researchers from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra (Slovakia) submitted the research project proposal Support of reading literacy in mother tongue and foreign language which was approved for financing. Originality of the project is based on the close connection of the proposed research and its school application. The project is oriented on the achievement of one of the main goals of Slovak and European education policy: supporting and developing reading strategies, developing general and detailed understanding of the text, developing the ability of text interpretation, critical and analytical thinking when processing text information.

In the first phase of the project the research team has been testing reading comprehension of texts in native language in primary and lower-secondary schools and in foreign languages in upper-secondary schools. At the same time they have also tried to identify quality indicators in reading comprehension depending on the interaction of language, cognitive and sociolinguistic variables of various age groups readers. Within the main objective, several aspects have been taken into consideration: sociological aspect (reading preferences of students), linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects (predictors of text comprehension on the level of interaction between the cognitive and language variables). Among the partial objectives it has been to determine whether understanding of texts is connected with desire for structure and reaction to the lack of structure, tolerance to uncertainty, grammatical and lexical competence as well as sociolinguistic competence. The differences between the variables mentioned above are currently being examined and analyzed and the paper will present some partial results and findings from the research carried out within the first year of the project.

Keywords:

Reading Literacy, Mother Tongue, Foreign Language, Predictors.