2015 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Utilizing Eye-Movement Data to Identify Reading Strategies of Proficient Readers in a Second Language
| Project/Area Number |
15K02770
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| Research Institution | Kinki University |
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Principal Investigator |
アトキンズ アンドリュー 近畿大学, 国際学部, 准教授 (70513331)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
Prichard Caleb 岡山大学, その他部局等, 准教授 (10440306)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
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| Keywords | ESL Reading Strategies / Eye Tracking / EFL Reading Strategies / Online Reading |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Our project has progressed more slowly than we had at first anticipated it would, although we were starting very much as beginners in the field of eye tracking.
Our first study helped us to further realise the limitations of the equipment and the testing instruments that we are using. After piloting our instruments we refined them and proceeded to administer the eye tracking instrument and a reading strategies survey to approximately 50 students. We found that only half of the students' eyes could be tracked by the equipment which was very disappointing. Some part of this failure was due to the researchers' unfamiliarity with the technology and some due to wearing glasses, make up and perhaps eye shape and colour. We also found that what students reported in their pre-reading survey about the strategies they use when reading was not corroborated by their eye tracking data for most cases raising questions about the effect on reading of using unobtrusive eye tracking technology and of the validity of the survey we used and of the difference between what participants ideally know they should do when reading and their actual performance. This pilot study was written up and submitted to a prestigious international ESL reading journal, Reading in a Foreign Language and is currently under review and we are hopeful it will be accepted. We are due to present the findings at an international conference in Cyprus, the EUROCALL Conference form 24-27 August. We are also planning to present at an International conference in Japan in November - the JALT2016 Conference from 24-28 November.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
Our delay is due to the eye tracking equipment not performing as we had hoped. The eye tracking technology that we purchased costs only about 4% of the equipment commonly used in the field. Learning how to make our equipment a useful tool for researchers will open the field to many. We had thought naively that it would be relatively easy to set up the equipment to track participants reading strategies but quickly found that tracking was often lost due to a number of controllable and uncontrollable factors such as participants wearing glasses or sparkly make up. We experienced problems with lighting in the rooms affecting tracking and what we think is certain eye lid shapes. The problems with eye lid shapes was confirmed by experienced researchers at the conference we attended in Vienna who had experience of carrying out research with Japanese participants.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
The next stage of our project comes online this coming week with data collection using a further refined instrument and much more control of any variable that we can control. Our understanding of the technology due to practical experience and theoretical reading around the subject has risen greatly and we are predicting that this experiment will be much more successful in terms of the percentage of sample size that can be used in data analyses. This experiment will again be a cross-sectional study and we are planning to run a pilot of a longitudinal study in the second semester of this year with the goal of running a further longitudinal study in the third year of our study. We plan to publish in prestigious journals in the field and present our findings at domestic and international conferences.
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| Causes of Carryover |
The reasons for not using all of our allocated budget in our first year are that we were unsure of the expenditure we would incur and therefore allocated more than we thought we would need so that we could react to unforeseen situations.
We also attended a conference in Vienna to research eye movements and as I was in Europe on private business I decided to pay for my own attendance at the conference saving money.
We had originally planned to buy 2 sets of equipment each and as our total allocation was less than we had applied for we changed our plan to buy only one set of equipment each.
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| Expenditure Plan for Carryover Budget |
This year we are planning to continue our research with a new study, and also we plan to present our initial study at 2 or 3 international conferences and some domestic ones.
I also plan to buy a PC for data analysis as my current machine is not performing as it should.
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