One of the strategic and ambitious goals at the Lisbon Summit is to attain the best possible quality of teaching and learning processes. One of the key academic competencies generating knowledge for the current information society is the reading literacy. The main goal of our pre-research project is to carry out a pilot study on reading literacy of the first year students at Alexander Dubcek University of Trencin, to identify their reading literacy level, and their ability to comprehend and work effectively with academic texts, and last but not least to identify their reading literacy deficiencies. The pre-research project will serve as a basis for a follow-up in-depth comparative research. In addition, suitability of the research methods will be tested and reliability and validity of the research to be carried out in collaboration with colleagues from the Universidad de Valencia and Universidad Católica de Valencia in Spain will be verified. The results we obtained in the first research phase from testing a small sample of Slovak first year university students indicated reading literacy deficiencies; i.e. students are insufficiently prepared to deal with academic texts of intermediate level of complexity and lack analytical and critical thinking.