Reading Literacy of Russian Fourth-Graders: Lessons from PIRLS‑2016

Abstract

Among the key concepts of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), reading comprehension processes are identified as the most operational, because they can serve as a basis for new teaching practices and new tools to assess academic achievements. The concept of reading processes, which is the focus of this article, has one more advantage: reading processes are defined in the PIRLS terms as universal and good for understanding both literary and informational texts. The PIRLS‑2016 test demonstrated that the reading literacy of Russian fourth-graders was far superior to that of their peers from fifty other countries. An item-by-item comparison of Russian fourth-graders’ answers to the test questions with the average PIRLS‑2016 results proves that Russian primary school graduates can interpret and integrate ideas and information extracted from a text much better than they can retrieve explicitly stated information from the same text. Determining the strongest and relatively weak points in the reading comprehension processes of Russian fourth-graders’ is required in order to unleash the educational resources that are not currently used and consequently to improve reading literacy at every stage of education.