A comparative study of reading comprehension skills among Hungarian students in Hungary and Slovakia

The present study aims to map the reading comprehension skills of the primary school students in Hungary and Slovakia and to see what differences there are in the reading habits, self-assessment and actual performance in reading comprehension between the two groups.A total of 240 survey respondents from the two countries and belonging to two age groups participated in this phase of research. The survey consisted of two parts. The first part was a self-completed questionnaire consisting of 23 questions, in which the students' sociological background, language use, reading habits, and subjective opinions related to the assessment of reading comprehension skills were assessed. The second part was a reading comprehension test, which consisted of three sets of texts and questions adapted to the cognitive abilities of the two age groups.An analysis of the answers shows that there is no significant difference between the self-evaluation of students in the two countries regarding their reading comprehension skills. There is however a difference between the reading habits of Hungarian students in Hungary vs. in Slovakia in both age groups, and a significant difference between the results of the reading comprehension test in the groups of students from the two countries.