Turkish Language Teacher Candidates' Multimodal Literacy Levels and Their Attitudes Towards Information and Communication Technologies

Abstract

As the digital technologies develop, the multi-modal structures in which multiple modes such as text, sound and image are used concurrently are frequently encountered in daily life. In this sense, the literacy levels of Turkish language teacher candidates who will work on improving their native language skills towards multimodal structures and their pre-disposition towards information and communication technologies they will use in order to use these structures are regarded as significant. The present study aimed to examine Turkish language teacher candidates' multimodal literacy levels and their attitudes towards information and communication technologies in terms of various variables and reveal the relationship between these two variables. The study was a quantitative study and was conducted in accordance with the relational screening model. The data was obtained from a total of 156 students studying at different levels in the Turkish language teaching undergraduate program at a state university. Data were collected with the Multimodal Literacy Scale, developed by Bulut, Ulu and Kan (2015), whose validity and reliability studies were conducted, and were also collected through the Information and Communication Technology Attitude Scale, which was developed by Günbatar (2014) and whose validity and reliability studies were conducted. In an attempt to reveal the relationship between variables, the simple linear relationship coefficient was calculated in the IBM SPSS 21 program. The significance of the scores obtained from the scales by gender and class was examined using the t-test, one of the parametric tests, and the Kruskal Wallis H test, one of the non-parametric tests, based on the normality of the distribution. As far as the results of the study are concerned, it was found that there was a medium-level relationship between Turkish language teacher candidates' attitudes towards information and communication technologies and their levels of multi-modal literacy (.350), and when the relationships between the sub-dimensions of the scales were examined, the two dimensions with the highest correlation coefficient were software use and Expressing oneself using multimodal structures (.541). It was concluded that the ICT attitudes did not differ significantly by the class and gender variables. It was also concluded that the multimodal literacy level demonstrated a significant difference in favor of the female students by gender, and between 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students in favor of 4th year students by the grade variable. The results obtained were considered and various suggestions were made.