Examination of Middle School Students’ Reading Anxiety in Terms of Various Variables

The purpose of this study is to determine students’ reading anxiety in terms of various variables. The study is a kind of descriptive research. The design of this research was the correlational model. In the study, 368 middle school students in the district of Ankara, Kecioren constitute the study group in accordance with the principle of voluntary and easy data collection. In this study, the scale of reading anxiety developed by Melanl？oglu (2014) was used as a data collection tool. In the analysis of the data, IBM-SPSS 22 program was used. As the data were not normally distributed, analyses were performed with non-parametric techniques such as Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, Mann Whitney U Test, and Kruskal Wallis Test. When the research findings were examined, it was determined that students had lower scores on the dimensions of “planning the reading process” and "aspects supporting reading" and they had scores above average on the dimension of "understanding and analysing the material read" of reading anxiety scale. No significant difference was found among the level of academic achievement in Turkish lesson and total scores of reading anxiety scale and any dimensions of reading anxiety scale. Based on the research findings, it was determined that there is no significant difference in the dimensions of reading anxiety according to gender, family income level, and the variable- when students read a book last. A significant difference was found in only sub-dimension of "understanding and analysing the material read" of reading anxiety scale according to education level of both mother and father whereas no significant difference was found in other dimensions according to education level of both mother and father. When the research findings were examined, it was determined that there was a significant difference on the dimensions of “planning the reading process” and "understanding and analysing the material read" of reading anxiety scale according to parent’s reading habit at home whereas no significant difference was found between the sub-dimension of "aspects supporting reading" of the reading anxiety scale and total scores of reading anxiety scale. Based on research findings, it has been proposed organize educational guidance works with purpose to reduce students’ reading anxiety