Abstract:
The ability of a person to decipher a written text has always been considered a critical and fundamental question since it is a major activity everyone performs every day. Moreover, social and emotional factors have grabbed the attention of researchers, such as gender, attitude and self-efficacy. This study is an attempt to explore Turkish EFL students' attitudes and self-efficacy towards reading based on their gender, as well as to determine their tendency towards use of individual versus collaborative reading strategies based on their gender. The study targeted 86 sophomore, junior and senior students from the English Language Teaching (ELT) department in Istanbul Aydin University. The study took two weeks during the fall semester in the 2019-2020 academic year. The data was collected with a wellestablished questionnaire consisting of 31 questions. The questionnaire was divided into three main parts; the learners’ attitudes towards reading; the learners’ tendency towards individual vs. collaborative reading strategies and the learners’ self-efficacy level towards reading. In data analysis, the descriptive statistics including frequency distribution, dispersion distribution, histogram and pie chart were used, as well as the Friedman test used to prioritize each item. However, after ensuring the accurate distribution of the variables, the independent sample t-test, Mann Whitney U test and Chi-square were used to test the hypotheses. The results showed that the students’ attitudes towards reading based on their gender were different, their tendency towards individual and collaborative reading strategies based on gender was different and their self-efficacy towards reading comprehension was also different. The results also revealed that among 86 participants in this study, 8 (9.3%) students preferred collaborative strategies and 78 (90.7%) students preferred individual strategies. This means more than 90 percent of Turkish EFL students in this study preferred individual strategies. This study will be a positive guide for EFL students who are interested in improving their reading skills based on social and emotional factors.
