Using eye tracking to understand the responses of learners to vocabulary learning strategy instruction and use

Abstract

This study examined the influence of morphological instruction in an eye-tracking English vocabulary recognition task. Sixty-eight freshmen enrolled in an English course and received either traditional or morphological instruction for learning English vocabulary. The experimental part of the study was conducted over two-hour class periods for seven weeks. To investigate the effects of morphological instruction on English vocabulary learning, all participants completed an English vocabulary recognition task. Fixation time and path during recognition were recorded with an eye-tracking device. A comparison between the post-test performances of both groups showed that the experimental group obtained a considerably higher score on the target eye-tracking vocabulary test. The results of the eye-tracking record showed that participants who received morphological instruction had longer fixation times on the vocabulary and morpheme areas compared with the group that received traditional instruction. In addition, the experimental group had dense fixation paths on the morpheme areas of vocabulary. These results indicate that participants who received morphological instruction considered the morphemes as inferring references to read and inferred unknown words with greater success.