Demands for a high-level development of foreign language reading comprehension skills and competences are now escalating and processing of foreign language text information is a matter of course. Pupils and teachers are faced with the need to work with textual information in more complicated ways, in which self-esteem plays an important role. This paper analyses learners’ success of reading comprehension in foreign language and real self-esteem in acquiring those skills. Self-esteem helps to promote language self-confidence, the learner’s level of aspiration, and adjustment to perception of foreign language structure. As long as the learner does not really perceive themselves (real “self”), it is difficult to talk about understanding lexical meanings and their real perception of grammatical structures in the text. The research goal was to find differences in self-esteem and success in foreign language reading comprehension skills with respect to categories of comprehension (specifically: I always understand everything; I have a lot of problems with text understanding; specifically: I experience difficulties with understanding unknown words; problem with understanding long sentences; difficulty with understanding the unfamiliar topic of the text; pictures help me in understanding; guiding questions help me in understanding). The research question was whether the self-image of learners in relation to the skill of foreign language reading comprehension is realistic given their real success in this skill. The research was carried out in the Slovak Republic on a sample of 327 respondents and found differences in subjective perception of understanding and success in reading comprehension skills. The research showed a low real self image of learners especially in categories of global character in respect to the average understanding of foreign language texts.

Self-development in terms of reading comprehension in a second foreign language is often practiced to a small extent in foreign language education. In the L2 (German language) educational process, the teacher focuses mainly on teaching basic grammatical phenomena and vocabulary. The development of reading comprehension in L2, as to text genres and forms, provides a new dimension in terms of self-development, as it mainly supports metacognitive processes and thus self-efficacy and success in a foreign language text understanding. The goal of the presented research was to find out connections between students success in reading comprehension with regard to different categories of text genres (adventure books, historical novels, fairy tales, poems, legends, and science fiction, and others) and text forms (either printed - magazines, newspapers, books, textbooks or electronic - e-books, websites, e-textbooks, and others). We were interested in whether a particular (concrete) genre or form of text does (or does not) contribute to the success in L2 reading comprehension or whether reading of any genre or form of text does (or does not) contribute to the success in L2 reading comprehension. The research was carried out in secondary vocational and grammar schools in Slovakia on a sample of 126 respondents. Statistically significant correlations were found between specific (concrete) genres and forms of texts and success in reading comprehension. It turns out that short stories, legends and books about nature predict better understanding of texts in the German language, and reading of printed books and magazines promotes success in L2 reading comprehension.

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