A READING COMPREHENSION SURVEY AMONG HUNGARIAN SECONDARY GRAMMAR SCHOOL STUDENTS IN SLOVAKIA

Abstract

This paper presents the aims, the methodology and the results of my reading comprehension survey among Hungarian students in Slovakia. The main aim of this research is to map those Hungarian secondary school students’ reading comprehension skills in Hungarian language who live in Slovakia in order to discover which areas of reading comprehension need further development in our education. In this paper only a segment of the whole survey will be presented. Students from 3 different types of secondary schools (secondary grammar school, vocational school and trade school) and 5 regions of Slovakia took part in the research. To show the reading comprehension skills of secondary grammar school students I chose four secondary grammar schools from the following regions of Slovakia: 1 Banská Bystrica region (Central Slovakia), 2 Trnava region (Southwestern Slovakia), 3 Nitra region (Southwestern Slovakia), 4 Bratislava region (Southwestern Slovakia). In this paper to name the schools the following abbreviations generated from the names of regions will be used: (1.) – BBR, (2.) – TR, (3.) – NR, (4.) – BR. All the above mentioned schools joined the survey with their first and fourth year students. I chose these two classes to take part in the research to discover some possible similarities and differences between the reading comprehension skills of those students who have just started secondary education (first graders) compared to those learners who are finishing their studies in the school year of 2018/2019 (fourth graders). 255 students took part in the survey from the mentioned four schools: 124 (48,6%) first graders and 131 (51,4%) fourth graders. The number of participants is determined by the total number of learners in the given class of a school. The participating students filled out a questionnaire and a reading comprehension test. The questionnaire included questions to reveal basic information about them, e.g. gender, place of residence, language usage at home, reading habits, etc. The test was based on the tasks of PISA 2009 [1] involving three texts with their items. I chose the PISA test because using the same items we can compare our own results with the results of 15-years old students in order to find out if the number of years spent in school education and the age of students influence their reading comprehension skills or not. In this paper I will analyse the results of the students connected to the test's continuous text. According to the text format a text is continuous if it involves sentences organized into paragraphs. To solve correctly the tasks students had to use two different thinking aspects: to integrate and interpret (1., 2. and 3. item) and to reflect and evaluate (4. item). From the results we know that more learners had answered correctly the tasks needing easier thinking aspect: the 1. item was answered correctly by 199 students (78%), the 2. item was correctly solved by 190 learners (74,5%) and 221 students (86,6%) gave right answer to the 3. item. In contrast the 4. item requiring the most complex thinking aspect was correctly solved by the lowest number of students: 180 (70,5%). To find possible reasons of students’ achievement in the paper the results will be analysed in details regarding the learners’ results of different age groups and genders towards items needing several aspects of thinking.