Influence of words’ frequency on the distribution of fixations in reading English and Russian texts in students with different levels of English proficiency

Abstract

The article describes the research results of the distribution peculiarity of fixations, depending on the frequency of words by reading texts in English and Russian by Russian-speaking students with the different levels of knowledge of the English language. As the research methods we used: Eye Tracking; Placement Test; Corpus analysis. We analyzed 102 eye tracking records. As a result, the work found that people with a level of Intermediate make fewer fixations on low-frequency words in the Russian text; people with the level of Elementary make a great number of fixations in the English text, this fixation is longer. We found significant differences in the number and duration of fixations on the words of different frequency.