Abstract
The importance of reading is especially emphasized nowadays when the majority of information, irrespective of the source (books, daily press, professional literature, web sources, etc.), is primarily accessed via reading. Therefore, effective reading and reading comprehension are important in everyday life, but also in an academic setting. This particularly refers to pre-service preschool and primary school teachers, whose teacher training courses imply a good command of reading skills, but also teaching skills required for the development and teaching of pre-reading and reading skills. In L2 reading, there are additional issues that need to be considered, principally the possibility of skill transfer between the mother tongue and the second/foreign language. Hence, this research aimed to test reading comprehension in both Croatian (L1) and English (L2) languages in a group of university students (N=83), studying to become pre-service preschool and primary school teachers. Reading comprehension tests and a background questionnaire were used as research instruments in this mixed-method research. Contrary to our expectations, reading comprehension test results were fairly low, i.e. out of a total of 17 points, the mean results for the Croatian language reading comprehension test were M=13.6 (SD=2.05), while for the English language reading comprehension test they were M=11.29 (SD=2.24). The results were further correlated with the participants’ self-assessed language knowledge and reading abilities in both languages. A positive correlation was found only between the English language reading comprehension test and the participants’ self-assessed language knowledge and reading ability. Based on the obtained results, it may be proposed that teachers should focus more on developing reading skills and reading comprehension at all levels as well as in all of the languages that the learners are acquiring, especially in view of the proposed possibility of the transfer of skills among languages.
Highlights
Reading and ComprehensionIt is difficult to imagine life in the modern world without reading because most of the information needed for everyday life is received in written form
The reading comprehension (RC) test was written in Croatian, and the participants were instructed to write their answers in Croatian as well
There are clear signals in the text that facilitate task solving, some research participants failed to identify them, and the reason may be a lack of focus when reading
Summary
Reading and ComprehensionIt is difficult to imagine life in the modern world without reading because most of the information needed for everyday life is received (and transmitted) in written form. In addition to being conditio sine qua non of living in complex contemporary circumstances, reading has been attracting the interest of many scholars from different disciplines Such an interdisciplinary approach to this phenomenon has yielded numerous definitions, confirming its complexity as there is still no single nor unambiguous denotation of the two main concepts: reading and reading comprehension. During the stimulation and development of pre-reading and reading skills through various (non)structured activities and initial reading and writing instruction, preschool and primary school teachers need to constantly ask questions about both denotative and connotative meaning of words. By revealing and comprehending different semantic layers in the information obtained through reading, we find the cognitive messages, but we perceive the beauty in these messages, which is important both for the emotional and aesthetic development of preschool and early school-aged children. Any data that is obtained through self-report heavily relies on the learners’ honesty, the Common European Framework of Reference (Vijeće Europe, 2005) states that self-assessment may be used as a support measure, especially when a student’s future does not directly depend on the assessment results
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