Media Awareness in English Education: Types of Reading Attitudes and its Effects on Post-reading Essay Assignments

Abstract

The aims of the present study are two-fold: one is to classify students’ attitudes and/or strategies while reading media texts in English and the other is to check whether different reading attitudes affect post-reading essay assignments. A total of 103 university students participated in the study, answering a reading attitude questionnaire and submitting six essay assignments. The results of a factor analysis and a cluster analysis on the questionnaire show that students were classified into three types, depending on the levels of critical reading and literal reading orientations.Further, the ANOVA on the essay assignments indicates that the average scores were significantly different according to the reading types. Although the study needs further replications to generalize the results, it will contribute to the discussion on the concept of “media awareness” and the method of measuring and/or evaluating it in the English education context.