Experiences of meaning and the multilingual existence

The aim of the article is to analyse the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the skills of reading and text-understanding, focusing on the comparative analysis of experiences of meaning in native language, Romanian and English in the case of Hungarian pupils. We attempted to present the qualitative indexes and factors of the process of reading texts written in native, secondary and foreign language with the help of questionnaires, the students’ data and tests measuring the performances of reading. The collection of data was realized in the spring of 2009. Through the collected data we attempted to answer the following questions: What kind of skills of understanding text do the pupils in the last year of primary school (i.e. 8th grade) possess? Which are the determining socio-cultural background factors? Can we differentiate between the common and specific features of reading and meaning-construction done in different languages? Can we speak about similar difficulties of reading and about the phenomenon of transfer in the case of meaning-discovery in different languages? The present study offers the possibility of creating training programs and teaching strategies based on local specificities, as well as of drafting curricula based on the pupils’ knowledge of language, desires and interests.