The reading literacy of Russian fourth-graders: lessons from PIRLS-2016

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.