Teachers often realize that the main cause of learning problems concerning students is a very bad reading
literacy. It can be found out that the majority of students have problems reading; they often avoid textual
exercises or read them slowly and confront with the problem of not understanding the text they have
read. Reading literacy has been dealt with very often lately. Slovenia as a country takes part in some
international projects and researches, trying to develop, improve and measure reading literacy.
The following article is written to present the results of the 2009 PISA study on reading literacy, milestones
for reading at the end of the third three-year cycle, the level of comprehension in reading and our findings
on the functional literacy of elementary school pupils of one of Slovenian schools in teaching technical
subjects.
Key words: functional literacy, reading and learning strategies, technical science and technology,
reading comprehension.