Relationship between primary school teaching prospective teachers habits of reading periodical publications and their level of critical and media literacy

The aim of this study is to determine the prospective students' habits of following newspaper and magazine and to determine the relationships between these habits and critical literacy and media literacy levels. Quantitative research methods were used in this research. The research model has the features of descriptive-relational survey model, one of the general survey models. Population of the study consists of all the prospective class teachers at normal education and evening education of Department of Primary School Teacher Education at Adnan Menderes University in 2012-2013 academic year. As 579 prospective primary school teachers, approximately all the students were reached, sampling selection method wasn't applied and the group reached was accepted as target population. "Critical Literacy Scale" developed by the researcher and "Media and Television Literacy Levels Scale" developed by Özgen and Korkmaz (2011) were used to collect data in the research after getting the necessary permissions.In order to develop Critical Literacy Scale, necessary literature was reviewed, experts' advices were taken, and similar scales were examined. As a result of all of these efforts, a 20-point draft question repository was created. Final form of the scale consisting of 14 points was reached after omitting 6 points in accordance with feedbacks taken from linguists, two domain experts and a psychological counseling and guidance expert. Validity and reliability studies of the scale were done as preliminary application was carried out on 203 prospective social studies teachers, and our scale consisting of 14 points and 2 dimensions took its final form. Cronbach Alpha value of our scale is .82.Chi-Square, Multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) and One-Way ANOVA were used to analyze the data collected in the research.As a result of the research, it can be said that girls' habits of following newspapers and journals are superior to boys' habits, and there is a significant relation between prospective students' habit of following journals and their parents' educational status. Also, it has been found that there is a significant difference between prospective students' media dependency levels in terms of their gender, grade levels and fathers' educational status. The other result is that there are significant relations between prospective students' habit of following newspapers and their media dependency level and between their habit of following journals and their critical writing skills. KEYWORDS: Literacy, Media, Critical Literacy, Media Literacy