Eye Movements Of The Effects On Reading Chinese And English With Different Reading Methods

Reading is a complex psychical process.It concludes readers' attention to reading materials,process of characters and words,extraction of meaning,the integration and comprehension of the whole sentence or even the meaning of the whole passage.Silent reading and reading aloud(oral reading)are viewed as two basic ways of reading.For a long time,whether the process of silent reading and oral reading is same is controversial.However,for Chinese students,the main language of reading is Chinese and the second is English.English is an alphabetic writing while Chinese belongs to ideo-phonograth.The two are different in the way of writing.As to research concerning eye movements,there are similarities and differences between the two.The purpose of this study is to explore the differences of eye movements index when China students read Chinese and English sentences with different levels of difficulties in the ways of silent reading and oral reading.The researcher used Eyelink 2000 eye movement machine and selected 32 college students and designed two experiments to study the characters of eye movement when using different ways to read Chinese and English sentences with different levels of difficulties.The two experiments used 2(silent reading,oral reading)× 2(difficult,easy)within-subjects design.The independent variables are reading mode and the levels of sentences' difficulties.Dependent variables are reading speed,the saccade left count,the saccade right count,the saccade right amplitude,the average fixation duration and the fixation count.Experiment 1 is to reading different difficult Chinese sentences aloud and reading different difficulty Chinese sentences silently.According to analyse the above eye movement indexes,the researcher wants to know how reading mode and the sentence difficulty effect the above indexes.The result is that reading mode effects the saccade right amplitude and the average fixation duration.The sentence difficulty effects reading speed,the saccade left count,the saccade right count,the average fixation duration and the fixation count.the interactive effect of reading mode and sentence difficulty affects the saccade left count,the saccade right count,the saccade right amplitude and the fixation count.Experiment 2 is to reading different difficult English sentences aloud and reading different difficulty Chinese sentences silently.The researcher wants to know how reading mode and the sentence difficulty effect the above indexes.The result is that reading mode effects reading speed,the saccade right count,the saccade right amplitude,the average fixation duration and the fixation count.The sentence difficulty effects reading speed,the saccade left count,the saccade right count,the average fixation duration and the fixation count.The interactive effect of reading mode and sentence difficulty affects the saccade right count and the fixation count.This indicates that silent reading is suitable for easy text materials.When Chinese college students read easy English,silent reading is better for improving reading efficiency.When reading difficult English,appropriate oral reading is better for understanding.When the reading materials need to recite,oral reading is better for memory.