Anxiety and Comprehension in Reading: I Can not Find the Main Idea, My Teacher!

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between primary school 4th grade students' reading comprehension and finding main idea skills and reading anxiety. The research was designed as relational survey method. The study group of the research consists of 211 students who are participated from 9 public primary schools that participated in the study as volunteers in Kirikkale province. In the collection of the data, personal information form, Reading Comprehension Test and Reading Anxiety Scale were used. The data of the study were collected between February and April of the spring term of 2014-2015 academic year. First, it was investigated whether the data exhibit a normal distribution. In the analysis of the data showing a normal distribution, parametric tests (independent samples t-test) and in the analysis of the data not showing a normal distribution, non-parametric tests (Kruskal Wallis, Mann-Whitney U, Spearman correlation analysis) were employed. The analyses of the data revealed that reading comprehension of the participants of the study was found to be medium and their reading anxiety level was found to be low. The reading comprehension scores of the participants do not vary depending on gender. On the other hand, the boys' reading anxiety mean level was found to be higher than that of the girls. The students' reading comprehension scores were found to be varying significantly depending on library membership. The students having a library membership have higher scores of reading comprehension than those not having a library membership. With increasing level of education of the parents, the students' reading comprehension scores were found to be increasing. Low level negative and significant correlation was found between reading anxiety and Turkish language course academic achievement. Moreover, there is a weak negative and significant correlation between reading anxiety and reading comprehension. Finally, it was found that the participants are not competent enough to detect the main idea in narrative and informative texts, high majority of the students could not write a main idea at all or they wrote false/incomplete main ideas.