THE RESULTS OF A READING COMPREHENSION SURVEY AMONG HUNGARIAN SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN SLOVAKIA.

In my paper I present the aims, the methods and a part of the results of my survey evaluating the reading comprehension competencies of Hungarian secondary school students in Slovakia. The main purpose of the survey was to map the level of secondary school students' reading comprehension skills to be familiar with the domains which need further improvement in our school education. Participants of the survey were first-year students and final-year students studying in three different school types (secondary grammar school, secondary technical school, and vocational school). The students filled in a questionnaire and a reading comprehension test. The questionnaire involved questions to find out basic information about the learners: e.g. gender, place of residence and questions to reveal possible factors influencing the participants' reading comprehension competencies: e.g. the language usage at home, reading habits, etc. The test consisted of three texts with items and it was based on the tasks of PISA 2009. We chose the PISA-survey because we have information about the 15-years old students' reading comprehension skills from official PISA-reports in Slovakia. In this way we can compare if there is any difference in the level of reading comprehension skills of 15-years old learners and students of different types of secondary schools. In this paper I show a segment of the survey by presenting the results of 167 students from four secondary technical schools in connection to one of the test's non-continuous texts (a product information) and its four tasks. To answer correctly the four items students needed to use all three thinking aspects of reading comprehension: to access and retrieve, to integrate and interpret and to reflect and evaluate. The results showed us that to find explicit information from the text was easier for the students than to express their own opinion about the text. In the future we plan to use our results to develop students' reading comprehension competencies in school education [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]