Abstract
The aim of the research project ""Reading comprehension - typical development and its risks"" is to describe the dynamics and variability of the development of reading comprehension of younger school-aged children, as well as identifying the internal and external factors which come into it. The introduced empirical study focuses on analysing the results of newly created diagnostical tools for assessing the understanding of reading among 4th graders (N=131), therefore at the age of functional reading comprehension.
It consists of two authorial reading texts, one of which is a story that children read out loud and the other one is based on the quiet reading technique. The third text is not read by children, they listen to it.
For this purpose a new test of listening has been developed - the effect of listening skills precedes the influence of reading skills. The shared trait of the three new diagnostical approaches is that they incorporate the explicit and implicit reading comprehension, they share an identical structure towards an observation of the understanding and they therefore can be assessed in two ways - by a comparison of the stimulating situations, but also by a comparison across the texts based on the types of imposed questions.