Employing Eye-Tracking Technology in Researching the Effectiveness of Recasts in CMC

This chapter reports on an exploratory study, which asked whether eye-tracking technology could help determine what learners attend to in an L2 SCMC task-based learning environment. Eight learners of English completed a two-way information gap with a native speaker of English. The learners’ eye movements were captured using a Tobii 1750 eye tracker. Learner eye movements immediately following a recast by the native speaker were evaluated for duration of eye fixation on the recast. Instances of learner uptake following recasts were also calculated. Results suggest that learners notice just over 60% of intensive recasts. The results also show that lexical recasts were much easier for learners to notice, retain, and use productively in subsequent chat interaction than were grammatical recasts. Further, learners were able to use the noticed lexical recast items more accurately than the noticed grammatical items on the post-test writing measure. Successful uptake ­following recasts was found to occur rarely. Finally, the data suggest that methodologically it may be problematic to consider learner uptake a strong measure of noticing. A call is made for follow-up studies using eye-tracking technology in the exploration of noticing, especially those which seek to correlate the eye-gaze ­measure of noticing with other, more established measures of noticing.