The Effect Of Formulaic Language On The Primary Students Reading : Evidence From Eye Movements

Lexical chunks are grammatical and sense group based multi-word units, which are formed according to readers’ reading experience and semantic relation. This research explores the advantage of lexical chunks in the primary students’ reading. This research focuses on the following tasks:(1) The effect of segmentation types on sentence reading for different grades’ primary school students.(2)The effect of segmentation types on sentence reading for students of different reading skills.(3) The effect of chunks segmentation on texts of varied levels for fourth-grade students’ reading.The thesis is consisted of 3 researches. In the first research,the participants are 96 primary school students. It explores the effect of different segmentation types on different grades’ students’ sentence reading by using eye tracker. Based on the first research, reading skill is introduced into the second research as a variation and 72 students are involved. It includes 3 experiments. The eye movements are detected to explore the effect of segmentation types on third-grade students, fourth-grade students and fifth-grade students of different reading skills in their sentence reading. The third research explores the effect of chunks segmentation on the 41 fourth-grade students’ text reading of varying levels of difficulty. The third research use paragraphs as experimental materials to verify the result of the first two researches.The results are as follows:(1) Lexical chunks has an advantage over the processing of the reading material, it could be the unit of reading.(2) Both of chunks segmentation and word segmentation promote better reading performance of the third and fifth graders who has lower reading skill.(3) It is the same that the role of chunks segmentation remains unchanged while the role of word segmentation declines as the grade inclines.(4) Lexical chunks do not promote reading significantly when the fourth-grade students are reading the easy text while it has a significant effect in reading of the difficult text.(5) Formulaic segmentation improve reading through reducing the fixation times and promoting reading comprehension.