2016 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 | Kindai 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, 全学教育・学生支援機構, 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 / Eye Movements / Gaze Tracking |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
As with the previous year, our research has progressed more slowly than we had hoped, although we have given presentations about our research at a domestic conference and some prestigious international conferences and published one paper in a peer-reviewed international journal - Reading Matrix, titled "Evaluating L2 Readers' Previewing Strategies Using Eye Tracking".
We have completed a study entitled "L2 Readers’ Global Processing and Selective Attention: An Eye Tracking Study" which is under consideration for publishing in the journal TESOL Quarterly. The acceptance rate for this journal is very low; however we are confident it will be accepted.
We presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference in Portland and the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Convention in Seattle in March. Both of these conferences are very competitive with probable acceptance rates of less than 30%.
We are coming to terms with the limitations of the eye tracking equipment and have had to compromise our original plans so that we can collect data from a higher percentage of participants than in the previous year. We are planning to present our research findings at conferences in Germany, the United Kingdom and Portugal this coming summer. The conference in Germany - The European Conference on Eye Movements is yet to be confirmed.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
We had hoped to have completed more studies and to be finding out more interesting things from our studies, however we have been slowed down by the inability of our equipment to track participants eyes in a consistently reliable manner. We are still unable to reliably collect data from those wearing glasses and from some eye shapes. We also originally planned to use full texts on a single screen, but due to the lack of precision in our equipment we have had to split texts accross a number of screens, making the tasks we are giving participants less authentic.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
We are planning to acquire a camera with a refresh rate of 150 Hz with our remaining budget. This provides much more precision and will hopefully mean that tracking improves along with reducing the number of participants we are forced to exclude from our studies.
We plan to continue our research into reading strategies in EFL learners and to begin examining reading fluency with eye tracking. This is of great interest to the lead researcher and at the recent conferences we attended in America, we were asked a number of times if we had considered investigating this area of interest
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| Causes of Carryover |
We would like to buy an eye tracker with a faster sampling rate to improve our data. I attended and presented at two conferences at the end of March and would like to claim the conference fees.
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| Expenditure Plan for Carryover Budget |
The funds will be used to buy a faster eye tracker and pay for conference fees.
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