What drives alignment during text chat with a peer vs. a tutor? : Insights from cued interviews and eye-tracking

Michel, Marije and O'Rourke, Breffni (2019) What drives alignment during text chat with a peer vs. a tutor? : Insights from cued interviews and eye-tracking. System, 83. pp. 50-63. ISSN 0346-251X

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Abstract

The authors conceived the study on which this article reports at an "Eye-tracking and SCMC" seminar at the Open University (OU). Stephen Bax, at the time just about to take up a professorship at OU, was also a contributor to the seminar, and presented his justly celebrated work exploring cognitive processes of reading-test takers using eye-tracking (Bax, 2013).On presenting our embryonic study design, we were encouraged by the reaction to the idea from Stephen Bax and the other participants to proceed with the work, and we owe a debt to him for that reason. But more generally, like many other colleagues in the field, we have been inspired by Stephen's idea of the normalisation of technology in language pedagogy (Bax, 2003; Chambers & Bax, 2006). Online communication is perhaps a paradigm case of normalisation – at least prospective normalisation: at one time an everyday activity principally among professionals like academics and scientists, later an esoteric interest for a small community of researchers into Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), technology-mediated communication has become pervasive in the lives of many, if not yet in language education (Plonsky & Ziegler, 2016). We hope that this study will make a contribution towards understanding the potential role of text-based communication as a common, if not yet fully normalised pedagogical activity, and the role of eye-tracking in researching it; and that it will stand as a small tribute to Stephen Bax's inspiring work.