The effect of strategy-focused reading education on reading comprehension, inference skills and reader self-efficacy

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of strategy-focused reading education in Turkish language classrooms on reading comprehension, inference skills and reader self- efficacy. The study was carried out with 60 (30 experimental and 30 control) 7th grade students chosen through convenient sampling. The participating two groups were assigned as experimental and control groups randomly. Before the study, a pilot study was conducted with 10 randomly selected participants. Cognitive and meta-cognitive reading strategies instruction was provided 2 hours a week with the help of Granül Responsibility Transfer model. The data were collected through the Reading Comprehension Test (Ülper et al., 2017), the Inference Skills Assessment Tool (Çetinkaya et al., 2023) and the Reader Self-Efficacy Scale (Ülper et al., 2013). Findings suggest that strategy-focused reading education affects reading comprehension achievement at moderate level, inference skills at high level and reader self-efficacy at moderate level. Findings totally pinpoint the positive effect of strategy-focused reading instruction on the reading processes in Turkish language teaching. Keywords: Strategy instruction, reading comprehension, inference skills, reading self- efficacy