Proceedings of the 23rd International Academic Conference, Venice

REFERENCE RESOLUTION OF EFL LEARNERS

EMRAH CINKARA

Abstract:

This study aimed to investigate first and total fixation times of pronouns in native English speakers and Turkish EFL speakers by using an eye tracking device, to specify the correlation between first and total fixation times of pronouns and perceived difficulty of understanding (PDU, and finally, to disclose participants’ personal comments regarding the cause of difficulty in pronoun resolution. MANOVA analyses suggested that there was a statistically significant difference between the total fixation times of parallel function pronoun resolution (PFR) and non- parallel function pronoun resolution (non-PFR) in native English and Turkish EFL speakers. The results also suggested that participants fixated significantly longer on non- PFR pronouns than on PFR pronouns. Additionally, we investigated a probable correlation between mean fixation times and personal (PDU) scores. Finally, the personal comments of the participants revealed two themes underlying the difficulty of understanding: namely, lexical accounts and grammatical accounts for pronoun resolution.

Keywords: Language learning, Reference resolution, English as a foreign langugage teaching

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2016.023.030

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