The thesis describes and analyses a special way of preparing secondary students for the new school-leaving exam in English in Hungary. According to this concept, it is possible to design multifunctional materials serving a double purpose of being reading comprehension tasks and sources of information and linguistic models useable in preparation for the oral part of the Matura exam. In order to prove this hypothesis a research was executed among the author’s students attending an academic grammar school. With the help of a questionnaire the respondents were first interviewed about their English studies, the ways of doing reading comprehension tasks and exploiting the texts they were based on. Secondly, the volunteering students took part in a pre-testing process involving the completion of a task sheet, which had been constructed in accordance with the established guidelines of material design. Thirdly, the participants completed another questionnaire in which they were invited to evaluate the reading texts and the tasks.