This eye-tracking study establishes basic benchmarks of eye movements during reading in heritage language (HL) by Russian-speaking adults and adolescents of high (n = 21) and low proficiency (n = 27). Heritage speakers (HSs) read sentences in Cyrillic, and their eye movements were compared to those of Russian monolingual skilled adult readers, 8-year-old children and L2 learners. Reading patterns of HSs revealed longer mean fixation durations, lower skipping probabilities, and higher regressive saccade rates than in monolingual adults. High-proficient HSs were more similar to monolingual children, while low-proficient HSs performed on par with L2 learners. Low-proficient HSs differed from high-proficient HSs in exhibiting lower skipping probabilities, higher fixation counts, and larger frequency effects. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the weaker links account of bilingual language processing as well as the divergent attainment theory of HL.
Reading and comprehending empirical articles are important skills for students to develop, yet many students struggle to identify and connect the essential information from empirical articles. Here we describe and evaluate a scaffolded approach for teaching undergraduate students to read empirical articles called the QALMRI method. The QALMRI is a generalizable instructional tool for teaching students to identify the key conceptual information necessary for the comprehension and critical evaluation of empirical articles. We had students in a first-year introductory course and students ina third-year research methods course read empirical articles and complete QALMRI outlines throughout the semester. We found that students very quickly learned to use the QALMRI outline in both upper and lower course levels, with performance corresponding to traditional written summaries.However, we also found that students consistently performed poorly on some items, prompting an update and revision to the QALMRI method to address these limitations.
In the present study, we used a scanpath approach to investigate reading processes and factors that can shape them in monolingual Russian‐speaking adults, 8‐year‐old children, and bilingual Russian‐speaking readers. We found that monolingual adults’ eye movement patterns exhibited a fluent scanpath reading process, representing effortless processing of the written material: They read straight from left to right at a fast pace, skipped words, and regressed rarely. Both high‐proficiency heritage‐language speakers’ and second graders’ eye movement patterns exhibited an intermediate scanpath reading process, characterized by a slower pace, longer fixations, an absence of word skipping, and short regressive saccades. Second‐language learners and low‐proficiency heritage‐language speakers exhibited a beginner reading process that involved the slowest pace, even longer fixations, no word skipping, and frequent rereading of the whole sentence and of particular words. We suggest that unlike intermediate readers who use the respective process to resolve local processing difficulties (e.g., word recognition failure), beginner readers, in addition, experience global‐level challenges in semantic and morphosyntactic information integration. Proficiency in Russian for heritage‐language speakers and comprehension scores for second‐language learners were the only individual difference factors predictive of the scanpath reading process adopted by bilingual speakers. Overall, the scanpath analysis revealed qualitative differences in scanpath reading processes among various groups of readers and thus adds a qualitative dimension to the conventional quantitative evaluation of word‐level eye‐tracking measures.
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