School Reading Lists and Understanding Written Information for Life and Work

Abstract

School reading lists are an essential factor influencing understanding the content and form of various types of texts: artistic, non-artistic, and electronic texts of an everyday nature among Czech technical secondary school pupils. The research aims to determine by analysing eight key school documents whether recommended school lists of texts for study at secondary technical schools are published electronically on schools' websites in the Moravian-Bohemian and Olomouc Regions of the Czech Republic. A partial goal is to determine whether school reading lists contain different types of texts and whether pupils at technical secondary schools understand information with a professional, artistic, media, etc., focus. A quantitatively oriented questionnaire survey through the lens of 523 pupils from 5 Czech secondary technical schools investigated what factors influence the reader's understanding of printed and electronic texts. The research results showed that Czech secondary school pupils like working with informal texts on social networks, frequently require help understanding texts of an administrative nature, and rarely work with texts from everyday life at school. The average to below-average level of reading and digital literacy among Czech 15-year-old pupils was also highlighted by the PISA 2018 international research.