Development of Turkish Reading Anxiety Scale

Abstract

This study aims to develop a Turkish reading anxiety scale (TRAS) for secondary school students whose mother tongue is not Turkish. In addition, since the subject of our study is people who do not receive education in their mother tongue, but receive education in a second language, it aims to develop a measurement tool to determine the effect of this difference on second language learning anxiety. The data of the study were applied to 432 8th grade secondary school students whose mother tongue was Kurdish and who learned Turkish afterwards. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis (EFA), it was seen that the items in the scale were collected in three factors and consisted of 19 items. These three factors are: “Fear”, “Anxiety” and “Preference”. It is seen that the three-factor structure obtained as a result of EFA was confirmed as a result of CFA. It is seen that the three-factor structure obtained as a result of EFA contributed 46.280% to the total variance. It is seen that the factor load values of the items ranged from 0.487 to 0.789. As a result of the item analysis, it is seen that the items in the scale are distinctive. As a result of the ANOVA analysis, it was concluded that students’ Turkish reading anxiety differed significantly according to gender, mother's knowledge of Turkish, and the language that parents wanted to be spoken at home. However, it was concluded that there was no significant difference between the father's knowledge of Turkish and the language spoken at home preference. The Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficients of the three-factor structure obtained from the TRAS were calculated as .81, .75 and .70, respectively, and the alpha coefficient for all items of the scale was calculated as 0.87. As a result, considering the validity and reliability analyzes, it was concluded that the TRAS is a reliable and valid measurement tool.