The aim of the study was to examine the relations between variables connected with the reader (interest in the text topic and willingness to read it) and the level of reading comprehension among adults, after controlling for text difficulty. The study involved 1549 users of Polish aged from 18 to 87. Open-ended questions were used to measure reading comprehension. It was proved that the model taking into account variables related to the reader better predicted reading comprehension than the model only taking into account text difficulty. Moderation analysis showed a little stronger relation between text topic interest and reading comprehension in the group of women than in the group of men. It was also noted that among adults with lower levels of education text topic interest and willingness to read it were more strongly related to the level of comprehension than among better educated people. The discussion focuses on the role of psychological factors in reading comprehension.

The paper focuses on the assessment of text difficulty in six contemporary Czech science textbooks for fourth graders. Text analysis followed the authors’ own methodology. The results obtained reveal varying text difficulty between individual textbooks. Only textbooks by the Alter and SPN publishing companies comply with the difficulty scale for fourth-year textbooks and may be recommended for teaching.

The paper is focused on text difficulty evaluation of six Czech natural science textbooks for the fifth grade. The text analysis was carried out by my method. The obtained results indicate that text difficulty is similar in four studied textbooks (30 points). They are textbooks of the following publishing companies – Alter, Fortuna, Prodos, SPN. These books belong to the scale of difficulty for the fifth grade. The mentioned textbooks can be successfully used in the process of education.