Seeing What They See: Elementary EFL Students Reading Science Texts

Abstract

Science texts use various text features and multiple representations to communicate meaning to their readers. English science texts are challenging for elementary-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Taiwan because they are familiar with reading language-controlled texts from textbooks. Teaching students to make use of various text features and visual representations will help them achieve a more successful science text reading experience. In this study, 27 Grade 6 Taiwanese students were instructed in science text reading strategies that included understanding text features, creating imagery, and using visual representations. Before and after the instruction, they took an English reading and writing test. Their eye movements during science text reading were recorded before and after the instruction to more fully understand their visual attention while reading English science texts. Eye movement performances such as number of fixations, mean fixation duration, and saccade size were examined. The findings showed that although the participants’ English reading and writing performance improved in the post-test, they focussed more on the written language than the visuals in both tests. More visual representation reading strategies should therefore be taught to help young EFL students read and learn from science texts.

A Systematic Review of Eye-Tracking Technology in Second Language Research

“…In particular, saccades, one of the fundamental measures of eye movements, were one of the least frequently used measure indices alongside eye blinks and pupil measures in L2 studies. However, there is one positive trend showing an increase in the application of saccadic eye-movement measures (e.g., Hung et al 2020;Pellicer-Sánchez et al 2021b). This is in contrast to the findings of Godfroid (2019) who found no saccadic measures used in her sample of publications (number of papers reviewed = 84).…”

“…There are some other types of gaze behaviors that have been adopted to measure attention, although less frequently, including gaze patterns (e.g., Hung et al 2020), skipping (e.g., Lee and Révész 2020), regression counts (e.g., Montero Perez 2019), and saccade spatial measures (e.g., Hung et al 2020). Gaze patterns integrate both spatial and temporal aspects of gaze behaviors, thus providing useful information to draw inferences on participants' patterns of attention (Rahal and Fiedler 2019).…”

“…Gaze patterns integrate both spatial and temporal aspects of gaze behaviors, thus providing useful information to draw inferences on participants' patterns of attention (Rahal and Fiedler 2019). For example, Hung et al (2020) visualized eye movements to represent attention, reporting that fixation-time-based heat maps provided a holistic view regarding L2 readers' visual attention to science text with visuals. Nevertheless, this approach is relatively uncommon, possibly because of the time-consuming nature of manually inspecting the gaze patterns of every participant, likely resulting in bias.…”

Using college readers' eye movements to discuss textbook reading strategies

“…Eye movement research has demonstrated that readers' eyes do not flow smoothly across a page of text, but rather make a series of very short pauses, called fixations, followed by extremely fast movements called saccades, to the next fixations (Hyönä & Kaakinen, 2019). Eye movements do not always proceed uniformly forward in a text, nor are the fixations always the same duration; rather, where the eyes go, and how long they stay there, are closely tied to attentional processes during reading (Hung et al., 2020). For an eye‐movement researcher, analyzing the location, order, and duration of fixations provides detailed information about a reader's comprehension processes.…”