Reading Text When Studying in a Second Language: An Eye‐Tracking Study

Dirix, Nicolas; Beken, Heleen Vander; Bruyne, Ellen De; Brysbaert, Marc; Duyck, Wouter

doi:10.1002/rrq.277

Cited by 36 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Chen and Catrambone (2015) observed that students required on average 18 minutes to study expository texts of 1,000 words in length (56 wpm), although in this study participants had to respond three times to metacognitive prompts. A similar number was found by Dirix, Vander Beken, De Bruyne, Brysbaert, and Duyck (2019): Participants studied at a rate of 54 wpm, whereas they read matched texts at a rate of 189 wpm. Persky and Hogg (2017) reported that their students on average needed 3.2 hours to study 7,500 word textbook chapters on physiology and pharmacokinetics (39 wpm), but studying happened at home (cf.…”

Section: Decrease Of Reading Rate In Old Agesupporting

confidence: 77%

How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate

Brysbaert

2019

Journal of Memory and Language

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had a reading rate of 3.9 words per second (234 wpm), the latter a rate of 7.3 words per second (438 wpm). Unfortunately, no information was given about how reading rate had been established. This encouraged Huey (1901) to reassess the issue. He selected 11 pages from an interesting novel, each containing 405 words, which presented no peculiar difficulties to the reader. Twenty university students were asked to read one page at a time while Huey measured the time with a stopwatch. There were 10 conditions. One was normal silent reading ("the way you like to read"). This rate was assessed twice. Another condition was to read silently as fast as possible, while still being able to follow the story line. Two other conditions of interest were reading aloud at a normal pace and at a maximal pace. 1 Huey reported reading rates of 5.35 and 5.91 words per second for silent normal reading (321 and 355 wpm), 8.21 words per second for silent maximal reading (493 wpm), 3.55 words per second for normal reading aloud (213 wpm), and 4.58 words per second for maximal reading aloud (275 wpm). The experiment was included in Huey's hugely influential book The psychology and pedagogy of reading (Huey, 1908), together with the data of Quantz (1898). As such, the very first estimates of normal silent reading were set between 300 and 350 wpm. Tinker An experimental psychologist very active in reading research in the first half of the 20 th century was Tinker. He published a series of over 20 papers addressing various variables that may affect reading speed, such as letter font and various layout options. In most of these studies he used the Chapman-Cook Speed of Reading test. It had two forms, each containing 30 paragraphs of 30 words. Toward the end of the paragraph there was an awkward word spoiling the paragraph. Participants had to tick off the word and finish as many paragraphs as possible in 1.75 minutes. An example of a paragraph was: "Yesterday I went downtown to buy some shoes and rubbers, but when I got home, I found I had forgotten to go to the flower-store to get them." University undergraduates typically finished some 18 paragraphs (540 words) in 1.75 minutes, making a reading speed of 309 wpm. In one of the rare studies taking longer than 1.75 minutes per condition, Tinker (1955) asked his participants to do the task for 30 minutes. They finished on average 317 paragraphs, given a reading rate of 317 wpm (30 words per paragraph and 30 minutes cancelling each other out). Unfortunately, the task was less than optimal, because the * means that the article is part of the meta-analyses

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Section: Decrease Of Reading Rate In Old Agesupporting

confidence: 77%

How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate

Brysbaert

2019

Journal of Memory and Language

Self Cite

256

136

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“…Very few studies compare the immediate understanding and learning of new content in a foreign and a native language. Those who do have found either detrimental or null effects of foreign language use, depending on the task [14,15], particularly without foreign language support [16]. These results have been accounted for in the context of cognitive load theory, which suggests a working memory overload for individuals trying to learn content in a language they are not proficient in [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

The effects of language and emotionality of stimuli on vocabulary learning

2020

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Learning new content and vocabulary in a foreign language can be particularly difficult. Yet, there are educational programs that require people to study in a language they are not native speakers of. For this reason, it is important to understand how these learning processes work and possibly differ from native language learning, as well as to develop strategies to ease this process. The current study takes advantage of emotionality-operationally defined as positive valence and high arousal-to improve memory. In two experiments, the present paper addresses whether participants have more difficulty learning the names of objects they have never seen before in their foreign language and whether embedding them in a positive semantic context can help make learning easier. With this in mind, we had participants (with a minimum of a B2 level of English) in two experiments (43 participants in Experiment 1 and 54 in Experiment 2) read descriptions of made-up objects-either positive or neutral and either in their native or a foreign language. The effects of language varied with the difficulty of the task and measure used. In both cases, learning the words in a positive context improved learning. Importantly, the effect of emotionality was not modulated by language, suggesting that the effects of emotionality are independent of language and could potentially be a useful tool for improving foreign language vocabulary learning.

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“…A final factor involved is the effort invested in the studying. For bilinguals similar to the ones studied in Experiments 1 and 2, a typical finding is that they require 20% more time to read and study the same materials in L2 than in L1 (Cop et al, 2016; Dirix et al, 2020). So, time pressure is likely to hurt L2 performance more than L1 performance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Studying texts in a non-native language: A further investigation of factors involved in the L2 recall cost

Beken

Bruyne

Brysbaert

2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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With academic internationalisation at full speed, English is increasingly used as a medium of instruction in higher education. The question arises of whether unbalanced bilinguals remember study materials in a non-native language (L2) as well as in a first language (L1). In previous studies, we found a disadvantage for students recalling short, expository texts in L2 compared with L1, but no such disadvantage for a true/false recognition test, not even on delayed tests after a month. As no additional forgetting occurs, the quality of the memory trace seems to be equally strong in both languages and the recall cost might be caused by a lack of production skill in L2. To test this hypothesis, we ran experiments in L1–L1, L2–L1, and L2–L2 conditions with free and cued recall (short open questions). We replicate the L2 free recall cost reported earlier and show that it is due to the encoding in L2 rather than to an L2 production cost. In contrast, we found no significant difference in a new pair of texts with short, cued recall questions, though there was a trend in the expected direction. A summary of the effect sizes obtained so far shows a considerable variety in magnitudes (with rather big confidence intervals), suggesting that the cost of studying in L2 depends on several factors such as study time, test requirement, and language proficiency level.

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Reading Text When Studying in a Second Language: An Eye‐Tracking Study

Cited by 36 publications

References 65 publications

How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate

How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate

The effects of language and emotionality of stimuli on vocabulary learning

Studying texts in a non-native language: A further investigation of factors involved in the L2 recall cost

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