The impact of computational thinking in foreign language teaching on success and metacognition in the context of reading skills

In current educational sciences approaches, instead of teaching only academic knowledge, it has begun to be adopted to provide students with thinking skills. One of the most prominent approaches among these skills today is computational thinking. Although computational thinking is generally referred to with STEM fields, it is actually a thinking skill needed in many fields from social studies to art. In this thesis, the place of computational thinking in foreign language learning will be investigated. While learning a language, students solve problems encountered in daily life, and for this purpose, students resort to metacognition many times. Metacognition is related to computational thinking because as metacognition increases, computational thinking is expected to increase. If these two thinking skills support each other, it is expected that learners' foreign language skills will also improve. In this thesis, the effect of computational thinking on metacognition and reading skills, which is a dimension of foreign language teaching, are investigated. In this context, 43 students studying at the 7th grade level in a public school in the 2022-2023 academic year were studied. A quasi-experimental design with pre-test & post-test control group was used in the research. Data were obtained by reading skill test and metacognition scale. At the end of the study, a significant difference was found in the reading skills of the students in favor of the experimental group. In addition, when the relationship between computational thinking activities and metacognition is considered only in the experimental group, not the control group, it is seen that the difference between the pretest and posttest scores is significant. However, when the experimental and control groups were evaluated together, no significant relationship was found between computational thinking activities and metacognition. Computational thinking activities did not contribute positively to the metacognition score against traditional reading activities. The results obtained at the end of the study have the potential to shed light on instructional designers, practitioners and researchers to support students' effective foreign language learning.