Critical Visual Reading Skills of Students

Abstract

Mother tongue education is accomplished with four basic language skills. These skills are listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. One of the basic skills that increase the vocabulary of the individual is the reading skill. Understanding and comprehension are important in this skill. Understanding of reading is a complicated process. There are many factors that affect the meaning of this process. The content of the text, such as the type and the punctuation, also affect the meaning. Visual reading has understanding qualities like text reading. Therefore, visual reading and visual comprehension also carry a textual characteristic. Accordingly, readers are expected to interpret the visuals with a critical approach in order to capture the details of the visuals. The purpose of this research is to determine whether the students are critical readers about the visuals. The study was qualitative based on a document review. The study was conducted with 20 students. Participants consisted of 10 fifth grade students and 10 sixth grade students. The data of the study were collected by taking the opinions of the students about visuals. The collected data were evaluated by content analysis. As a result of the study, it was seen that the students evaluated the images with a critical eye and the female students were more critical than the male students. As a result, it has been determined that the students differ in terms of mental development stages.