Reading Literacy as One of the Most Significant Academic Competencies for the University Students

Abstract

At the Lisbon Summit, the Council of Europe set a highly ambitious strategic goal for the European Union: to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion. In the process of achieving this goal, education and job readiness have played a critical role. Therefore, one of the strategic and ambitious goals is to attain the best possible quality of teaching and learning processes. One of the key academic competencies generating knowledge for the current information society is the reading literacy. The main goal of our pre-research project is to carry out a pilot study on reading literacy of the first year students at Alexander Dubcek University of Trencin, to identify their reading literacy level, and their ability to comprehend and work effectively with academic texts, and last but not least to identify their reading literacy deficiencies. The pre-research project will serve as a basis for a follow-up in-depth comparative research. In addition, suitability of the research methods will be tested and reliability and validity of the research to be carried out in collaboration with colleagues from the Universidad de Valencia and Universidad Católica de Valencia in Spain will be verified. The research on reading literacy will test Slovak and Spanish first year students studying at public and private universities. Identical texts having intermediate academic difficulty in the students’ mother tongue will be employed in order to identify and compare real competences and the reading comprehension level of university students in both countries. An empirical, analytical and comparative research will be conducted. The results we obtained in the first research phase from testing a small sample of Slovak first year university students indicated reading literacy deficiencies; i.e. students are insufficiently prepared to deal with academic texts of intermediate level of complexity and lack analytical and critical thinking. Students were assigned to write an abstract and a power-point presentation, common and frequently used linguistic genres in academic setting in order to assess their ability to systematize and synthesize written text, and thus to identify their real reading literacy.