Examination of 8th grade students' perceptions on comprehension skills through their drawings

Mother tongue education strives to develop competence in both qualified thinking skills and language skills because language is mechanism that generates thoughts as well as a means of interaction. In this context; determining students' perceptions of comprehension skills including listening and reading is crucial in terms of developing language skills and using them effectively. The purpose of this study is to determine the 8th grade students' assessments of their comprehension abilities through the visuals they've created and the explanation sentences they've written for those visuals. The participants of the research are 30 volunteer students in the 13-14 age group who are studying in the 8th grade in the town of Kahta in Adiyaman. The questions "What comes to mind when you hear the word?" and "What comes to mind when you think of reading?" have been used to determine the students' perceptions about the concepts of listening and reading. The students have been given two lesson hours to draw pictures in response to these questions and write explanations of their designs on the reverse of the paper they've used for their drawings. In this direction, the phenomenology design, one of the qualitative research designs, has been used. Since the data of the research consist of the pictures drawn by the participants and the explanations behind the pictures, document analysis, one of the data collection techniques, has been used in the research. The collected data have been analyzed by content analysis method. In the analysis of the data, first of all, the contents of the visuals have been examined in detail, and thematic coding has been made by using the existing concepts in the literature, the participant expressions behind the visuals drawn by the students, and the expressions that have been determined to describe the phenomenon best, and categories have been created in this direction. As a result of the research, it's been determined that the majority of the students have positive perceptions about their comprehension skills. It has been determined that students associate their comprehension skills both with the education they receive in learning and teaching environments and with daily life. The issues raised in this study can be resolved by encouraging students to read critically without pressuring them, by teaching them the value of listening in interpersonal interactions, and by utilizing music effectively in the development of listening skills. Keywords: Comprehension Skills; Perception; Visual Literacy; Listening Skill; Reading Skill.