Foreign language teacher students’ attitudes toward reading: Implications for language teacher education

Abstract

The study investigates the reading attitude of language teacher students and how reading attitude differs in terms of the variables gender, major, education experience, and level of proficiency. In the study, the Reading Attitude Scale was used which is developed to measure the reading attitudes of teacher students. The scale is implemented to language teacher students studying foreign language teaching at a public university in Turkey. The data were collected from language teacher students with two majors (English and German) during the academic year 2020 – 2021. The data were analysed by using the PASW Statistics 18.00 program. As the data showed normal distribution, the parametric statistical analyses independent – samples t-Test and one-way ANOVA were used. The results revealed that language teacher students' reading attitude differs in terms of the variables gender, major and education experience. But in terms of the level of proficiency, there were significant differences just in the category personal and social development. In the other categories, there were no significant differences. Based on the study findings it is suggested to support learners with extracurricular reading activities and materials, which applies to their interests and their preferences of reading texts in a foreign language.