A Study on the Factors That Affect Turkish Students' Reading Comprehension Skills

Most of us often seem to read a piece of text, but we usually ignore using essential reading strategies during reading process. Thus, in this study a great deal of information was given about effective reading strategies to comprehend a passage or any other reading material in both native and foreign language. This study aims to show the significance of reading comprehension and the factors that affect the reading comprehension of Turkish students who want to improve their proficiency while reading an English material. It has been discovered that especially third class students, whose test results were better than the others in both tests, are the ones who read much in Turkish as much as in English. According to their answers to the questions in the questionnaire, it was understood that these students are much more interested in reading than the others who failed. In general, the successful students have enough knowledge about the basic reading comprehension strategies. That is w y; they not only read faster but also understand better. Consequently, it can be concluded from the results given in the tables that if a foreign language learner likes reading and makes use of these strategies during reading activities, he/she can understand better and faster both in his native language and in English. The findings in this study are suggestive rather than definitive.