EXAMINATION OF STUDENTS’ READING COMPETENCES ON MEDIEVAL TEXTS

Abstract

Reading comprehension is a cross-curricular skill on which the understanding of the each subject depends. Therefore, it has become a practice not to test what students can remember and reproduce, but to what extent they are able to apply their reading skills. For the purpose of this research the testing of reading skills was conducted in the First Belgrade Gymnasium. The same test was done by the students of all grades and the development of competences at different ages was monitored. Testing was done before the students of the first grade were introduced to the poetics of medieval literature. It was therefore convenient to analyze how the knowledge of medieval poetics influences the understanding of the texts that belong to it. In the first class students were expected to accomplish worse results because they encountered less well-known semantic and grammatical structures. The analysis of the results shows interesting and unexpected connections between the age, the knowledge of the poetic qualities and the achievements on the test. The paper is accompanied by a test, a specification with educational standards and levels of achievement, a graphical representation of achievement by age, and a student evaluation of the test.