An investigation on primary school 4th graders' reading motivation and attitudes towars reading (A case of Esenler district)

In this study, which was prepared as a master's thesis, it was aimed to examine and compare the reading motivation and attitudes of 4th grade students in terms of various variables. The data collection group of the study, in which descriptive scanning method is used, consists of 932 primary school 4th grade students of 8 public schools in Esenler District of Istanbul province in 2018-2019 academic year. To collect data, "The Motivation for Reading Questionnaire-Turkish Form", developed by Wang and Guthire (2004) and adapted to Turkish by Yıldız (2010), "Garfield Picture for 1-6th Grade Students to Turkish", developed by Mckenna and Kear (1990) and adapted to Turkish by Kocaarslan (2013) and Personal Information Form, developed by the researcher were used. Besides, non-parametric analyzes, which were gained through Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, were also used. Frequency and percentage distributions, Mann Whitney U, Kruskal Wallis H, Non-parametric tests: Two or more Independent Samples tests were used. For the final step, Spearman Sequential Differences Correlation test was used to find out the relationship between reading motivation and reading attitudes of students. In this study, it is found that there is a statistically significant difference between the reading attitudes scores and reading motivation scores of the students. It was found gender, educational status of students' parents, the presence of a library in students' homes, receiving pre-school education have statistically significant difference on students' reading motivation. While there was a significant positive difference according to the presence of a library and gender, there was no significant difference according to educational status of parents and receiving preschool education. These results have been discussed and compared with the results of previous similar studies and various solutions have been proposed. Key words: Reading, 4th grade, primary school, reading motivation, reading attitude, attitude towards reading