ANALYSIS OF PROSPECTIVE CLASSROOM TEACHERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS READING BOOK

Teachers' attitudes towards reading affect their professional development. Since they will be teachers of the future, they have to show that they are worthy to read and show effective literacy behaviors and become successful teachers. The objective of the research is to determine the prospective classroom teachers’ attitudes towards reading book. The research model has been employed as survey which is one of the quantitative research methods. The study group of the research consists of 500 prospective classroom teachers receiving education in eight different cities. In the collection of research data, the Attitude Scale for Reading Book was used. Data were collected in December of the year 2017, and in the months of January, February, March, April and May of 2018. The prospective classroom teachers’ attitudes towards reading book were analyzed by gender, the city where lived in and the class level. 249 of the prospective teachers participating in the research are third year undergraduate; 251 of them are final (fourth) year undergraduate; 386 of them are female and 114 of them are male. According to the research results, all of the prospective classroom teachers have a positive attitude towards reading book. The attitudes towards reading book which have been adopted by the prospective classroom teachers still receiving their education as third year and final year undergraduate students are at the same level. By gender variable, the scores for attitudes towards reading book are significantly higher in female prospective teachers than it is for males. Considering the city where they live in, the prospective teachers’ reading attitudes show a statistically significant difference: Reading attitudes by the prospective teachers living in Istanbul have been found significantly higher than the reading attitude scores for the ones living in other cities. There may be evidence that prospective teachers have a positive reading attitude, use them effectively, have a good general culture level and provide professional development. Article visualizations