Effects of Teacher Candidates’ Social Media Use on Reading Cultures in Turkey

Abstract

With rapidly developing technology, the most common social area of our lives has become social media. While social media brings with it new notions, it also affects the culture we have. One of them is the culture of reading. Reading culture includes making the act of reading a philosophy of life. The act of reading requires education. The most common place where we receive this education is in schools. Teachers, one of the basic elements of schools, play an important role in the transformation of reading into a reading culture. For this purpose, this research aims to determine the effect of teacher candidates’ social media use on their reading culture. The study consists of two parts. In the first part, reading culture was examined according to the variables of gender, class level, region of residence, number of siblings, economic status of the family, education level of parents, and number of annual book readings. In the second part, the reading cultures of teacher candidates were examined according to the variables of daily online time, duration of social media use, age of having a social media account, and purposes of using social media. The study was created by scanning method. Türkel et al. (2017) developed the scale applied. The obtained data were analyzed in SPSS 24. Mann-Whitney U Test was used for pairwise comparisons and the Kruskal-Wallis H test for multiple comparisons. In conclusion, there was a significant difference in favor of women in terms of teacher candidates’ reading cultures and gender variables. In terms of grade level, a significant difference was found in favor of 3rd and 4th-grade levels. There is no significant difference in reading culture in terms of other variables. However, when we ignore the student with a master’s education level, the reading culture score of the teacher candidates with illiterate parents in the education level of the parents was higher. Again, in terms of daily use of social media, the reading culture scores of the candidates who used one hour or less were higher. The social media factor is important in terms of transferring and enriching the reading culture.