From ”learning to read” to ”reading to learn”: An analysis of the reading mistakes made by students

Reading literacy is a complex competence that consists of a series of functionally applicable knowledge, skills, attitudes and strategies that the individual gains and uses through formal and informal education and through everyday life. In addition to the skills, which allow the reader to understand individual words and sentences, the backbone of the development of reading literacy is the development of skills and processes that allow them to construct the meaning of the entirety of the text. Mastering these skills paves the way for children to transition from the learning- to-read phase to the reading-to-learn phase, which should take place towards the end of the first cycle of compulsory education. This is why the aim of this study was to explore in detail the difficulties that pupils face at the end of the 4th grade, regarding reading comprehension. The study included 170 pupils from Belgrade. The study was conducted in groups and lasted for one school period. The study used 50 tasks that previous research had shown reliably tested different levels of reading comprehension at the given age. The tasks were divided into six blocks (6 to 9 tasks per block), and each child did two blocks of tasks (incomplete study design). All the incorrect answers were analysed in detail against the type of requirement that the specific task had, and they were classified according to the type of mistake that the child made. The results showed that at the end of the 4th grade a significant number of students had not developed skills that comprise the backbone for reading comprehension, based on which we concluded that their capacity to use reading as a tool of learning and development was somewhat limited.