Developing Reading Comprehension in L2 with respect to Text Genre and Form

Abstract

Self-development in terms of reading comprehension in a second foreign language is often practiced to a small extent in foreign language education. In the L2 (German language) educational process, the teacher focuses mainly on teaching basic grammatical phenomena and vocabulary. The development of reading comprehension in L2, as to text genres and forms, provides a new dimension in terms of self-development, as it mainly supports metacognitive processes and thus self-efficacy and success in a foreign language text understanding. The goal of the presented research was to find out connections between students success in reading comprehension with regard to different categories of text genres (adventure books, historical novels, fairy tales, poems, legends, and science fiction, and others) and text forms (either printed - magazines, newspapers, books, textbooks or electronic - e-books, websites, e-textbooks, and others). We were interested in whether a particular (concrete) genre or form of text does (or does not) contribute to the success in L2 reading comprehension or whether reading of any genre or form of text does (or does not) contribute to the success in L2 reading comprehension. The research was carried out in secondary vocational and grammar schools in Slovakia on a sample of 126 respondents. Statistically significant correlations were found between specific (concrete) genres and forms of texts and success in reading comprehension. It turns out that short stories, legends and books about nature predict better understanding of texts in the German language, and reading of printed books and magazines promotes success in L2 reading comprehension.