Understanding the use of eye-tracking recordings to measure and classify reading ability in elementary children school

The iRead EU Project has released literacy games for Spanish, German, Greek, and English for L1 and L2 acquisition. In order to understand the impact of these games on reading skills for L1 German pupils, the authors employed an eye-tracking recording of pupils’ readings on a weekly basis as part of an after-school reading club. This work seeks to first understand how to interpret the eye-tracker data for such a study. Five pupils participated in the project and read short texts over the course of five weeks. The resulting data set was extensive enough to perform preliminary analysis on how to use the eye-tracking data to provide information on skill acquisition looking at pupils’ reading accuracy and speed. Given our set-up, we can show that the eye-tracker is accurate enough to measure relative reading speed between long and short vowels for selected 2-syllable words. As a result, eye-tracking data can visualize three different types of beginning readers: memorizers, pattern learners, and those with reading problems.