Investigating Reading Behaviors of Elementary School Students in Oman Using Eye-Tracking: A Study on Familiar and Unfamiliar Arabic Content

Abstract

This research aims to identify Oman's elementary students' reading behaviours in familiar and unfamiliar Arabic texts through an eye-tracking device. When comparing the results regarding the fixation duration and the number of fixations and saccades of second-, third-, and fourth-grade students watching the two different forms of content, fundamental differences were revealed. Specifically, students in second and third grades read unfamiliar content with longer F1, more F, and S than reading familiar content, indicating that the students invested more cognitive processing time. Therefore, the results presented herein demystify the difficulties young students experience when confronting new content and the need to employ specific intervention approaches in teaching Arabic reading.

Keywords: eye-tracking, reading behaviour, content familiarity, grade levels, fixation duration, saccades, Arabic language, elementary school, Oman Introduction

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005799