
Last October, I mentioned traveling back to the states to pick up and receive training on a piece of research equipment that my boss wanted to use for a new study on Japanese beginning readers. After staying briefly in Boston and Birmingham, holding up each security checkpoint at every airport, I made it back to Japan with two computers, mini monitors, a bunch of cables, and an ASL Eye Tracker D6, a high-speed camera and control unit that can detect and record the eye movements of a reader.
This equipment is the newest advancement in observing what your eyes do when you read, a subject that has actually been researched for over 100 years. The original researchers, of which I’m reading a book about now, used a thin plaster of Paris cup with a tiny hole drilled in the center, coated with a little cocaine and placed on the surface of a reader’s eye, and an aluminum pointer connected to the cup that flicked marks onto “smoked paper” when the eye moved while reading (lying on their back, I presume; I wish I had a picture to share).
The ASL EyeTracker allows a reader to sit comfortably at a computer monitor, while a discreet camera below uses infrared light to detect the angle between the reader’s right pupil and the reflection of light hitting their cornea, which determines where the reader is looking on the screen. EMMA, or Eye Movement and Miscue Analysis, is a recently developed research method that uses this eye-tracking equipment and audio to analyze an oral reader’s eye movements and oral reading miscues compared to the original text.
From Ken Goodman’s website,
Miscue analysis, with over 40 years of history, provides a ‘window on the reading process’ and reveals the knowledge and strategies readers use as they comprehend written texts.
And eye-movement analysis opens another window, allowing researchers to observe, in part, what a reader is thinking while they read. Research in both of these areas has found that we may not be doing what we think we’re doing when we read. For example, we don’t look at every word, we don’t consistently look from left to right, and we occasionally substitute, omit, or insert words into the text that are not there. But all of this helps us in making better sense of the text.
The image above depicts the eye movements of a nursery school teacher, Megumi, reading a few pages from an English children’s book. Although this was done just for practice, (the first line is a bit messy, due to me temporarily losing focus of the eye, and asking the teacher to reread), it contains examples of findings from this line of research that have been so “eye opening” [rimshot].
First, a quick explanation of what you’re looking at. The blue dots are fixations, or points where the eye pauses and focuses. The red lines are saccades, or rapid movements the eyes make from one point to another. Since information is only received from the eyes when they are still, the blue dots and the remote area surrounding them are the only places in the text the reader saw. The size of the blue dot denotes the amount of time the reader paused.
Now Megumi read aloud every word correctly, but her eye movements show that she didn’t look at every word. For example, she didn’t look at “Here”, or “is” on the last line, perhaps because the text repeats these words in each line. She did, however, look at bath twice. Megumi told me after I showed her eye movements to her that the word “bath” seemed odd, since the preceding lines were “blue sheep” and “red sheep”.
So whereas many researchers have interpreted reading as “decoding” or “word recognition”, and commercial reading programs heavily promote strategies to decode or sound out words, the thought here is that reading must be about more than just seeing words on a page. The reason a reader can say and understand a word without looking at it is because they are using more than their eyes to read. It’s as if your brain has a joystick that moves the eyes only to places where it needs more information to interpret the text. Or, as Goodman puts it, the eyes are merely “in service” to the brain as it constructs meaning of a text. But this idea really comes at odds with how several very popular reading programs assume reading works.
Consider the DIBELS Nonsense Word Fluency test, used by millions of children in America after it was approved as scientifically based by the Dept. of Ed. and funded in almost every Reading First grant. Children are timed and measured on their ability to sound out nonsense words (raj, zur, wal, fiv) as an indicator of reading development. Do you really have to be able to sound out nonsense before you can make sense of print? I think the eye movement and miscue analysis research makes a strong case that readers reading real texts don’t have to be so concerned with each letter or word to read. In fact, Edmund Huey, who authored the 100 year old book on eye movement and reading research I’m reading, made the same point. Interestingly, my copy of his book, which has been out of print since the 60’s, came from a library and has the word “DISCARD” written across it. I guess it was.
Our hope with this study is to see what Japanese beginning readers do when they read, and see how it compares to findings of reading in English. I’ve been really excited to do this, even though preparing for this study has begun to consume a lot of my time outside the classroom.
Meanwhile, back in the classroom, the kids and I have been reading, writing, and talking about food. We started with two big books, Monster Sandwich and Yuck Soup (both by Joy Cowley) which introduced the words yum and yuck. We then made a chart of foods we liked and disliked. We also talked about healthy foods, and found that many of our “yuck” foods the children considered to be healthy, and while there were some pictures of chocolate and cake on our “yum” side, there was also a lot of fruit.
I also realized that the children regularly eat foods they consider “yuck” when it is served to them at lunch. This is a disposition I find to be vastly different than that of children I’ve eaten with in America (and me as a child). We’re planning on cooking something together in the next couple weeks so I hope to share more about the whole project soon.
The schools have also been busy preparing for their annual Hapiokai, or music festival. It’s a tradition in Japanese schools to hold a musical/theatrical/dance performance for parents every year. Just to give you an idea of the scale, we are talking keyboards, xylophones, kotos, drums, percussion, costumes, sets, and countless hours of rehearsal. As with the Sports Festival in October, the practicing has cut into my English lessons partly, but has also given me more time to prepare for our EMMA study, hopefully to be done in March. Below is a clip from a practice session. After this week, I’ll have videos from the festivals to share.
Until then,