The Effect of Using Eye Tracking and Thinking: A loud technique to assist foreign language learners to recognize and understand the meaning of English words in reading texts

Abstract

The current study combined traditional superiority and equivalence tests to investigate the effect of using eye tracking and thinking, a loud technique for helping learners recognize and understand the meaning of English words in reading texts. This study used equivalent tests, which are supposed to be more suitable for engaging unreactive learners. High levels of English learners were selected to read short texts enclosing pseudo-words. The participants were divided into three groups: two experimental groups (i.e., eye tracking and thinking aloud), and one control group. The findings revealed that neither of the two experimental groups showed a strong performance when recognizing and understanding the meaning of English words. However, thinking aloud had a somewhat better impact in contrast to eye tracking.