Publication details
Learning of Chinese as a Second Language and Its Influence on Reading style: An Eye-tracking Study
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The present study aims to look into the possible effect of learning Chinese as a second language on the reading style of an individual, where European students from an analytic culture (in our case, Czech and Slovak) learn a language of a holistic culture as a second language and become assimilated to the target culture (which is the Chinese one). Reading style and reading strategies have been an area of productive research in recent years (Koornneef & Mulders, 2017; Rayner et al., 2006; Rayner et al., 2009). In literature, readers have been reported to differ in terms of the riskiness of the reading strategy adopted-- in eye-tracking research, risky readers are characterized by more frequent word skipping, longer saccades, and more frequent regressions. According to literature in reading style, the behaviour of such readers involves more word guessing (of word n+1), and we argue that such reading style is accordingly more context-dependent and involves processing of lexical semantic information in a holistic manner. Therefore, we hypothesize that risky readers are in general more holistic in terms of their cognitive style. We will present the result based on an exploratory study of a student of Chinese philology with Czech or Slovak being their first language and another student of a different major that does not involve a holistic culture. We plan to report on the results from an eye-tracking reading experiment, and a cognitive style test (Compound Figure Test). Still another important theoretical issue to be explored in the present study is whether a reader may exhibit the same reading profiles when exposed to different texts, or a reader may show different reading profiles when exposed to different types of texts, which is still a pending but critical issue in reading style (Koornneef & Mulders, 2017: 54-55). To this end, we will expose the Czech/Slovak learner of Chinese to different texts to see whether the reading profiles of an individual are stable across different reading tasks so may be considered a type of personal trait. The paper will also discuss the pedagogical implication of such reading style analysis that involves the learning of Chinese as a second language. |