Developing critical visual reading skills of secondary school 7th grade students

Critical visual reading is the encouragement of visual elements to be questioned by moving the questioning at the basis of critical thinking to the visual dimension. Critical visual literacy as a skill involves reasoning, counter-reading, asking difficult questions, seeing the hidden truth of the text, and understanding for whom and for what purpose the text was written. Critical visual literacy education, which is often integrated with mother tongue education in various countries, develops students' skills to interact with written and visual texts in a deeper way. This study is considered important because it is thought that the study can provide information about the implementation of Turkish lessons for the development of critical visual reading skills of secondary school 7th grade students, the activity and application examples in the study can provide ideas for new activities and applications, and the study can contribute to Turkish teachers, Turkish language teaching and the literature. In this context, the aim of the study is to improve the critical visual reading skill levels of secondary school 7th grade students through action plans enriched with contemporary teaching methods and techniques. This study, which was conducted with an action research design, lasted for a total of nine weeks (two weeks pilot implementation, seven weeks actual implementation). Throughout the study, Turkish lessons were enriched with contemporary teaching methods and techniques in order to improve the critical visual reading skills of 7th grade students. The study group consisted of 15 seventh grade students with moderate academic achievement enrolled in a public educational institution in Afyonkarahisar city center. Data were collected through researcher's diary, student diaries, semi-structured focus group interviews, Critical Visual Reading Scale and classroom observations. The qualitative data obtained were subjected to content analysis. Normality test analysis and Paired Samples t-test were used to analyze quantitative data. According to the results of the study, it was seen that the students whose critical visual reading skill levels were found to be low before the study improved their skills at the end of the study.