Abstract:

This case study explored reading patterns in the eye movement miscue analysis of adult participants who speak more than one language. Eye movement miscue analysis or EMMA (Paulson, 2000; Duckett, 2001) is a research methodology that combines the tracking of reader’s eyes while recording their oral miscues from their readings. Miscues are observed responses that differ from the expected response (Goodman, Watson, Burke, 2005). Data from the combined eye movement and miscue analysis methodology provides researchers with a map of the reading process (Paulson & Freeman, 2003). In this research, I examined the following questions: What strategies do Tagalog native speakers employ when reading texts in English and their native language? How are these reading strategies evident in the readers eye movement miscue analysis or EMMA data patterns? In what ways do the participants’ reading strategies demonstrate the universality of the reading process?

Findings showed that EMMA reading patterns of participants fluent in Tagalog and English provided support for the universality of the reading process (Goodman, 2009). Eye movement and oral reading miscue patterns demonstrated how the adult participants in this study used similar strategies like sampling, predicting, inferring, disconfirming and correcting as they made sense of the text they were asked to read in Tagalog and English. For example, evidence of sampling strategy patterns from readers’ EMMA data showed how the participants scanned the text before, during and after reading a text aloud. An Applied Science Laboratory Model 504 eye tracker helped record x and y coordinates of the eye movement data. Eye movement data with the digital recording of the oral readings to track miscues completed the data for analysis of the reading patterns. Other strategies like making predictions were observed when the readers read ahead or substituted high quality miscues to make sense of their reading. Readers showed sampling and predicting strategies when they read both the Tagalog and English versions of the selected texts.

As with EMMA studies on adult readers and bilingual children (Paulson, 2000; Duckett 2001; Freeman, 2002), the adult bilingual readers in this study also did not read word by word and only fixated on 60%- 80% of the text when reading. Readers in this study who were proficient in both Tagalog and English spent less time looking at the words, had lesser fixations in both Tagalog and English while demonstrating high comprehension of the material they read. Fixations show that the eye stopped and it is the only time when data is transmitted to the brain (Paulson and Freeman, 2003). This study confirms a single reading process (Goodman, 2009) as demonstrated in the reading strategies of the adult bilingual readers’ who were fluent in Tagalog and English.

Keywords:

Literacy research, eye movement miscue analysis, EMMA, technology use in reading research, adult bilingual readers, reading strategies.