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.