The Effects Of Chinese EFL Learners’ RSA On Their English Reading Achievements

The researches on reading abroad have got great achievements from1960s.And in domestic, reading researches also have developed a lot since these ten years.However, there are nearly no researches based on the relations between RSA andreading achievements. What is more, most reading researches observe students’reading only through analyzing their scores because of the limitations of conditionsand measurements.This study applies eye tracking technique, the continuous eye movement datacan improve our analysis on the real-time process of students during their reading.This study aims to find the correlation between RSA and reading achievements fromthis aspect. This thesis addresses two questions:(1) Does RSA have effects onChinese EFL learners’ reading achievements?(2) How does RSA effect on ChineseEFL learners’ reading achievements from the perspective of eye movement?There are both qualitative and quantitative researches in this thesis. Thequantitative research is to analyze RSA Test scores, reading achievements and eyemovement indexes, while the qualitative research is to analyze the eye movementmodels in reading. This study chooses30students from SISU as subjects. Theapparatus is EyeLink1000from SR Research Company. Each subject was requiredto finish an RSA Test after accomplishing reading the three materials. All thebehavioral and eye movement data were put into the statistic software SPSS. Theexperiment was completed in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience And ForeignLanguage Learning in SISU.The research obtains the following findings:(1) To all the subjects, there issignificant correlation between RSA and reading achievements (r=0.705). Thatmeans RSA has effects on reading achievements. Higher RSA students have betterreading achievements and lower RSA students have worse reading achievements.(2)There is significant distinctions between higher RSA students and lower RSA students in their average fixation duration (p=0.000). However, there is nosignificant distinction between them in the saccade counts (p=0.373) and the totalfixation duration (p=0.172). It may indicate that different RSA students may havedifferent eye movement models. What is more, a student’s RSA is mainly determinedby his or her ability of sequencing segmented sentences into a passage.