Over the last four decades, the professional and scientific community focused attention on the importance of developing language skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing. The acquired reading competence is the fundamental generic intellectual skill necessary for successful functioning in the contemporary world, at the personal and professional level. By developing reading literacy while teaching the mother tongue, we enable pupils to understand written words and texts of differing functional styles. The starting point with reading is the skill to translate written symbols into spoken words, i.e. the process of word recognition as basic reading processes which develop rather quickly and reach optimum levels by the age of eight or nine. Opposed to that, the development of comprehension skills is not time-limited and implies lifelong development. The paper will discuss the importance of continuous development and improvement of the skill and ability to read focusing on teacher education students and followed by primary school teachers – which will be correlated to the development of their pupils' reading skills. The results will indicate the current situation in the education vertical relating to the development of reading skills. The postulate is found in strategic documents that state the importance of reading for an individual and the development of his core competences: The Lisbon Strategy of the Council of Europe (2000) Strategy for Education, Science and Technology (2014) and Teaching Reading in Europe: Contexts, Policies and Practices (2011) and relevant contemporary research in the area.