The relationship between perceptions of quality of school life and sense of school belonging among bilingual and monolingual students

This study is carried out to analyze bilingual and monolingual students? ? who are attending to secondary school in Adıyaman ? perceptions of school life quality and sense of school belonging.Population of the study is the sixth, seventh and eight grade students attended to the secondary schools in Adıyaman in 2009-2010 school year, whose mother tongue is Turkish or Kurdish. The sample of the study consisted of 563 native speakers of Turkish and 477 bilingual students, totally 1040 students who were attending to 12 schools in Gerger, Besni, and Tut districts. The data of the study were collected using Quality of School Life Scale (QSLS), Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale (PSSM) and Personal Information Form. To analyze the gathered data descriptive statistics, independent samples of t-test, one-way analysis of variance and regression analyses were performed.According to the findings, the means of the QSLS subscales for bilingual students whose mother tongue is not Turkish were between 3.01 and 3.82 while it was 3.46 for the total scores of the QSLS. Furthermore, in terms of subscales, the means calculated for native Turkish speakers were between 2.83 and 3.89, and it was 3.45 for QSLS total scores. In terms of mother tongue, there were significant differences between the scores obtained from the Student-student communication and School administration subscales of the QSLS in favor of bilingual students; and there were significant differences between the scores obtained from the Emotions toward school and Status subscales of the QSLQ in favor of Turkish native speakers. In terms of gender, there was significant difference between QSLQ scores in favor of female students. On the other hand, in terms of parents? education level, there were significant differences in favor of students whose parents graduated from primary school.Another variable investigated in the study is the sense of school belonging. According to the findings, the sense of school belonging was over the average points to for both groups. As a result of the comparisons carried out in the study, it is found that the PSSM scores differed significantly in favor of students whose native language is Turkish and in favor of female students in terms of gender. In addition, it is found that the students whose parents were illiterate have the lowest PSSM scores, and the PSSM scores differed significantly in favor of other groups. Furthermore, there were significant differences between the PSSM scores in terms of the students? family income.Another result of the study is that the students who have higher sense of school belonging have higher means for all dimensions of the QSLS, and there were statistically significant differences between means of the two groups. In addition, the correlation analyses revealed that there is a significant relationship between the QSLQ and PSSM scores. It is also found that PSSM scores were significant predictors of the QSLQ scores and it accounts for 33% of the total variance. The relative sequence of the predictive variables was followed as sense of rejection (.439) and sense of school belonging (.239).Keywords : Quality of School Life, (QSL), Sense of School Belonging (SSB), Bilingual Students, Regression.