Relationship Between Critical Reading Skills Of Secondary School Students And Their Attitudes Toward Reading

Reading is an active process which increases the capacity of human knowledge, forms his thoughts and beliefs, and makes him/her gain personality. In essence of this activity, „comprehension‟ lies as an aim. The main purpose in reading is reading comprehension and improving the ability to understand in this way. Reading comprehension is one of the basic language skills which require illation from a written material and comprehension of details and it should be made students gain even from the primary school level (Rose et al. 2000: 55). Reading comprehension skills depend on the reader's perception and recognition of symbols in written language, linguistic knowledge, mental skills and the skills related to real life. Beyond these, the reader's willingness, interests in reading, judgments, purposes of reading and the setting have impacts on the level of reading comprehension (Akyol, 2005: 3). Attitudes are also accepted to be trends which are source of favorable or unfavorable interpretations made about the behaviors of the individual and also source of the individual's positive or negative reactions to the surroundings. The attitudes of the individual can be against to a social group, an institution, a situation or a thought (Turgut, 1984: 154). The reading habits and self-confidence, in another words perception of selfefficacy about reading comprehension, of students, who can interpret and give meaning to reading materials, about reading comprehension are also improved. Students, who complete reading activities successfully and comprehend the reading materials, succeed better in other courses also. The purpose of this research is to determine the relationship between the critical reading skills of elementary school students and their attitudes against reading. To this end, descriptive method has been applied for the study and two different surveys have been prepared in the form of five-point likert-type. Three secondary schools with different socio-economic and cultural environments in the province of Siirt were selected as the population of the study. For sampling, students studying in 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th level of these schools are selected. After weeding out uncompleted or unconsciously completed surveys, the responses of 1200 students are used for statistical analysis. The relationship between critical reading skills of students and their attitudes toward reading has been tried to be established by SPSS 15.0, for this purpose descriptive statistics, independent groups t-test, one-way analysis of variance and correlation was used. Conclusions and recommendations are presented based on the findings.