The effects of making connection strategies on reading (A study on primary school students)

The focus of this study is the reading comprehension difficulties of the students in learning and teaching process. It would be better to start with Turkish course in order to solve this problem. Basically, the success in other courses is connected with the success in Turkish course because reading comprehension skill is required to be actively used in all courses. In this study the effect of Turkish instruction based on reading comprehension strategies on students' reading comprehension skills were investigated. While the level of reading comprehension dependent variable, the making connection strategies which was the implemented reading comprehension strategies is the independented variable. In this study it was investigated that whether there is an effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable. In this study, mix method (quantitative and qualitative method) was employed to get the data of study. Both groups were trained by their own teachers in order not to decrease the reliability. The study was carried out with third grade students Sarıyahşi Vedat Büyüköztaş Primary School in centre of Sarıyahşi in 2016-2017 academic terms. A sample of 26 students ( 13 of them in the experimantal group and 13 of them in the control group) was involved in this study. In this research Reading Comprehension Achievement Tests which were prepared by the researcher were used as an assessment and evaluation instrument. The data obtained from the study were analyzed using SPSS 16.0 statistical programming. In analysing Mann Whitney U-Test and content analysis were used. As a result of the survey, reading comprehension total success grade of experimental group students who were instructed making connection strategies was statistically higher than the grades' of control group students who continued their traditional shedule. This statement indicated that teaching of making connection strategies was effective. Key Words: Making connection strategies, Reading, Reading comprehension, Reading comprehension strategies.