In spite of Russia’s leading position in PIRLS 2006 [1] – its fourth-graders are among the top performers – it is still extremely important to detect strong and weak points of the students’ reading skills as this can offer information for future avenues for improving and modernizing methods of reading instruction. Several approaches of qualitative data analysis have been applied in the research that will be presented, all aimed at identifying strengths and weaknesses in Russian fourth-graders’ reading performance. Part 1. For each of the 125 items included in PIRLS 2006 the difference between the Russian indicator of performance of the item and the average international indicator [2] has been calculated (the difference ranges from 35.9 to -4.7). Then the items have been arranged according to this indicator into three groups: the first group includes 25% of the items (31 items) for which the given indicator is negative or rather small (the value of the indicator differs from -4.7 to 9.1). This group has been marked as the problems area group. Another group includes 25% of the items (31 items) for which the given indicator is high (the value of the indicator ranges from 18.2 to 35.9) and this labeled the success area group. Finally, the remaining 50% of the items (63 items) have been united into the group named as the prosperity area group. The analysis of different parameters of the items (purpose of reading, process of comprehension, level of difficulty, type), in these three groups provides answers to such questions as: What texts (literary or informational) are more comprehensive for Russian fourth-graders? What reading abilities (in relation to the four processes of comprehension assessed in PIRLS) do Russian fourth-graders have? How do Russian fourth-graders perform on items of different levels of difficulty? It should be noted that the performance of Russian fourth-graders on the information texts are to a certain degree lower than the ones of the literary texts, therefore it is necessary to pay more attention to information texts of various structure, putting an emphasis on the skills of information texts readers: focus on and retrieve explicitly stated information. - --continues in Methodology---

---- Part 2. Central here is the following question: «What are the weakest points of Russian students’ reading literacy? » To address this question, it has been decided to define a group of items for which the difference between the Russian indicators and the maximum international indicators shown in PIRLS 2006 is greatest, i.e. the items for which Russia’s achievements differ the most from the world’s best ones. For this purpose, for each item the difference between the Russian indicator and the maximum international indicator has been calculated. Then the items for which this difference is significantly below the average value on this indicator (-8.79, with a standard deviation of 8.16) have been placed into a group, which has been analyzed in order to reveal weaknesses of Russian fourth-graders in reading literacy.

---- Part 3. To address the question « What are the strongest points of Russian students’ reading literacy? » we decided to identify the items for which the Russian performance indicator is the maximum international one. This group of items has also been analyzed in order to reveal the strong points of reading literacy of Russian fourth-graders.