A close reading of reading comprehension among Swedish students in grade 4

A slight decrease in Swedish students’ reading ability has recently been shown in national as well as international reading tests, e.g. PIRLS 2006. It is thus of great importance to refine the knowledge of what type of reading comprehension Swedish students at the four different levels of the international benchmarks are able to carry out. This is therefore the overall purpose of this study. Another purpose is to create a theoretical framework and a method for keeping track within a qualitative perspective of changes in students’ reading comprehension by e.g. studying trends in PIRLS. Reading comprehension is in this study discussed in terms of ‘text movability’. This is a notion inspired by the work of several researchers, e.g. Langer (1995) and her identification of four different ways of moving in a text in order to build an envisionment or a mental textworld. The results show that it is quite common that many students, even those at the low international benchmark, manage to get one point in a complex constructed response question. But very few manage to get two or three points, even though the only extra load in some questions is to find the answers at two or more different locations in the text. This would be of great interest to compare in an international context. Another result is that some of the Swedish students especially at the low and intermediate international benchmark have a broader repertoire of reading ability than expected.