The Impact of teaching mental imagery on reading comprehension, reading attitude, and vividness of mental imagery skills of 4 graders

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of mental imagery based on explicit teaching as a reading strategy on the reading comprehension, vividness of mental imagery and reading attitudes in Turkish lessons of primary school 4th graders. The study was carried out in fall semester in 2014-2015 academic year, and participants was consisted of 54 fourth grade students in two different classes in a state primary school in Bartın province. The study was carried out with a quasi-experimental design: pretest-posttest non-equivalent group design. Experimental process took 10 weeks, and during the process, multiple mental image creating techniques and activities on the basis of teaching model based on explicit teaching were administered. In this study, a “Reading Comprehension Test” which was developed by the researcher was used as data collection tool. In addition, “Vividness of Imagery Questionnaire” developed by Sheveland (1992) and “Elementary Reading Attitude Survey” developed by McKenna and Kear (1990) were adapted into Turkish and used in the study. In order to test the hypotheses of the study, one-way ANCOVA was used. The findings of the study revealed a significant difference in favor of experimental group in reading comprehension, vividness of mental imagery, and reading attitude scores.