Reading is a highly organised skill and competence that involves numerous factors. (Pečjak, 1919) "Difficulties related to reading are the main cause of poor performance at school, as they represent reading skill that is the basic pedagogical competence, the foundation for school learning. (Košak and Babuder, 2011: 87) It is very important that we understand what we read. For non-native speakers, understanding English texts pose an even greater challenge because it is a process that involves the ability to decode, vocabulary, prior knowledge of the subject and relevant strategies that give meaning to the text and enable its understanding (Kintsch and Kintsch, 2005 in Babuder, 2011).
The aim of this master's thesis is to determine how successful Slovenian 6th grade students are in solving tasks designed to test their reading comprehension skills, which factors influence their (lack of) success and how reading fluency is related to reading comprehension. In the theoretical part, the similarities and differences between reading comprehension in the first (i.e. Slovenian) and foreign language (i.e. English) are highlighted. It also describes some factors that, according to the available research studies, influence text comprehension, as well as the relationship between reading comprehension and reading fluency in English as a foreign language, as indicated in accessible research materials. The research part of the paper examines the relationship between text comprehension in a foreign language and reading fluency on the one hand and text comprehension and some selected factors on the other.
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