Impact of critical reading and argumentative reading methods on reading comprehension level of 6th grade students (Sample of Muş province)

This study aims to reveal the impact of critical reading and argumentative reading methods on reading comprehension level of 6th grade students. During the study, pretest-posttest experimental design with control group was used as the research method. While the population of the research consisted of the students from the secondary schools in the Central district of Muş province, the sample consisted of 6th grade students educated in a public school in Muş/Center. In the study, the students were applied to the "Reading Comprehension Test", which includes the pretest questions prepared by the researcher, before the experimental process. After that, reading education studies in which the critical reading and argumentative reading methods were used in addition to the normal teaching were conducted with the experiment group during 8 weeks, while only the normal teaching continued in the control group. At the end of this period, the "Reading Comprehension Test", which includes the posttest questions prepared by the researcher, was applied to the experiment and control groups. The data obtained from the research were loaded to SPSS 20 program and subjected to the analyses of "Paired Samples t-Test", "Independent Samples t-Test" and "Two-Way ANOVA for Mixed Measures". The results obtained as a result of these analyses showed that there was no significant difference between experiment and control groups in terms of reading comprehension level before the experimental process; however, a significant difference came out in favor of the experiment group in terms of reading comprehension level between the two groups after the experimental process in which the critical and argumentative reading methods were used. Likewise, in the same study, it was detected that there were significant differences between pretest and posttest scores at in-group and inter group level. This shows that the critical and argumentative reading methods significantly contributed to the reading comprehension level of 6th grade students. Keywords: 6th Grade, Reading Comprehension, Critical Reading, Argumentative Reading.