Eyemovements Of Print Awareness Development In Picture Book Independent Reading With Children From 4 To 6 Years Old

Print awareness which has been taken as one of the key building blocks of the literacy development, is the awareness of print convention and print function, it has received attention of researchers and reading policy makers, a growing body studies have studied the children's print awareness through analyzing the visual attention on print with eyetracker, and have revealed that the children rarely look at the print when they are being read to, and there were not the same conclusion on the effect of print salience and language ability on the fixation on the print during picture book reading. Most of studies were monitored under the parent-child story reading context, few studies have analyzed the broad features of visual attention on print during picture book reading independently recently, the scanpath of eye movements and the procedure of print awareness development haven't been studied, however.This research studied the broad features, developmental stages and cognitive procedure of print awareness development with eye-gaze analysis of fixation on the print of the picture books during independent reading. A total of 121 children ranging in age from 4 to 6 years old particated in this study, recruited from five kindergartens at Shanghai, China. The reading materials are'the very hungry caterpillar','The three robbers'and'the napping house'which are welcomed by the children worldwide, and have been translated into Chinese. The children's eye movements while reading individually were monitored by Tobii T60 from Tobii Technology AB. The three indexes used for analysis are First to fixation time, Proportion of fixation length and Proportion of fixation counts. The children were also measured with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test(PPVT-Ⅲ), the print recognition on the Putonghua Communicative Development Inventor) (PCDI) and Chinese character orthography awareness. The hypothesis were tested with SPSS 16.0 and AMOS5.0, the scanpathes of eye movements during print fixation were analyzed with eyePattern V0.91。The results of studies on the broad features of fixation during picture book reading independently revealed that children in all of the age groups attended to illustration earlier than print, spent a greater percentage of time looking at the illustration in the books compared to the print, a higher proportion of fixation length also. But this study found that the indexes from independent reading were higher than those from shared picture book reading. The independent reading can stimulate child's attention to the print. Increasing with age, young children paid attention to the print more quickly, and put more fixation time and counts on the print.The results of studies on the impact factor on the print fixation revealed that the reading duration isn't the critical factor. Increased with the longer reading duration, the level of print fixation kept low, there're positive effects on the development of children's literacy development, however. With the longer reading time, the children's reading ability and print awareness have been developed. The salience and location of print also have no significant effect on the print fixation during picture book reading also. The effect of speech bubbles on the print fixation should be compared with other features of picture book. Children's receptive language ability and orthographic awareness have different effect on the print fixation, with age increased, the orthographic awareness have become more important, there's co-directional relationship between the print fixation and print acquisition, and the relationship are obvious at age 6.The results of study on the cognitive procedure of print awareness development showed that EyePatterns could be applied to analyze the scanpathes during picture book reading; the children from 4 to 6 ages have gotten information from more key informational zone, and gotten the whole understanding with age increased. The scanpath patterns while children picture book reading was changed from "Circulation model" to "Repeat model". For the children who fixated their attention on the print, the cognitive procedures of print awareness have changed from "Top to down" model to "Interactive" model.According to these 7 studies, we concluded that the preschool children read the picture book from picture to print. The Chinese children are attending to pay more attention to the print during reading. The adults should focus their effort on the development of children's print awareness during reading instruction, building the basis of literacy development for children. The teachers should create independent reading context for children, let children have more time to explore the print with their reading ability. Help the child understanding the story.This research had 5 breakthroughs, on the research approach; these studies focused the development of print awareness through analyzing the fixation on print. On the research method, theses research applied the eyetracker and explored the analysis of scanpathes. On the study context, these studies were monitored under the ecological context. On the finding, these studies analyzed the development stages and the cognitive procedure of print awareness development.This research had 3 weaknesses also; first, the print recognition of the picture book had not been measured, so we didn't control the level of print recognition of the picture book. Second, the analysis software of scanpath is impacted by the group mount and the count of scanpath, so the effectiveness of scanpath analysis should be tested more. And the developmental stages of print awareness and the cognitive procedure found in this research should be tested in the further studies.For the further studies, we think that these four aspects should be gotten more attention; one is the print awareness studies with multi-methods, such as the observational study, the behavioral test and cognitive neuroscience. Another one, the sub-contract of print awareness during preschool period should be studies. The other one, the impact of Chinese character on the print awareness of Chinese children should be studies in the future. Lastly, the print awareness of children with Chinese development dyslexia should be gotten attention in the future.