The impact of visual-based story-creation activities on the development of reading comprehension skills

In the process of writing a story, students' thinking skills are actively used to develop creativity, critical thinking, etc., as well as their ability to make narration related to visuals. In this context, it is thought that visual literacy and story creation activities can increase students' reading comprehension achievement. Based on this, this study aimed to examine the effect of story writing activities using visual literacy skills on reading comprehension achievement with 4th grade students. In our study, story writing activities carried out with visual literacy skills were evaluated in the context of reading comprehension skills in elementary Turkish course. In our study, a semi-experimental design with pre-test post-test control group, one of the quantitative research models, was carried out with 4th grade students a school in Süleymanpaşa district of Tekirdağ province. The pre-test and post-test data of the experimental and control groups were collected with the reading comprehension scale titled 'The Princess Who Slept All Day' prepared by Baş (2014). During the study process, 6 different visual stories were presented to the experimental group students for 6 class hours per week for 6 weeks and story writing activities based on detailed analysis of these visuals were carried out. The visual-based stories used were taken from the book 'Bildergeschichten an Stationen' adapted into Turkish by the researchers. The control group continued the standard Turkish teaching curriculum during this process. As a result of the study, it was determined that visual-based story creation activities had a significant effect on the reading comprehension achievement of the experimental group students (p = .000). When the post-test results between the experimental and control groups were analyzed, it was determined that the scores of the experimental group were significantly higher than the control group (U = 499.500, p = .000). These findings show that visual-based writing activities are effective in increasing reading comprehension achievement. The results of the study revealed the effect of visual literacy skill, which is one of the 21st century skills, on increasing reading comprehension achievement and showed that this area should be addressed more in the curriculum.