Background

Extant eye-tracking studies suggest that foreign-language learners tend to read the native language captions while watching foreign-language videos. However, it remains unclear how the captions affect the learners' eye movements when watching Math videos.

Purpose

While watching teaching videos, we seek to determine how the lesson type (English or Math), cognitive load (high or low), and caption type (meaningful, no captions, or meaningless) affect the dwell times and fixation counts on the captions.

Methods

One hundred and eighty undergraduate students were randomly and equally assigned to six (2 lesson type × 3 caption type) conditions. Each participant watched two short teaching videos (one low load and one high load). After watching each video, a comprehension test and three self-reported items (fatigue, effort, and difficulty) regarding this particular video were given.

Results

We reported more dwell times and fixation counts on the meaningful captions, compared to the meaningless captions and no captions. In the high-load condition, viewers watching an English lesson relied more on the meaningful captions than they did when watching a Math lesson. In the low-load condition, the dwell times and fixation counts on the captions were similar between the English and Math lessons. Finally, the captions did not affect the comprehension test performances after ruling out individual differences in the prior performances of English and Math.

Conclusions

English language learning may rely more on the captions than is the case in learning Math. This study provides the direction for designing multimedia teaching materials in the current trend of multimedia teaching.

中文翻译：

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观看第二语言与数学课的字幕视频时，眼动模式有所不同

背景

现有的眼球追踪研究表明，外语学习者在观看外语视频时倾向于阅读母语字幕。然而，目前尚不清楚字幕如何影响学习者在观看数学视频时的眼球运动。

目的

在观看教学视频时，我们试图确定课程类型（英语或数学）、认知负荷（高或低）和字幕类型（有意义、无字幕或无意义）如何影响字幕的停留时间和注视次数。

方法

一百八十名本科生被随机平均分配到六个（2 课类型 × 3 字幕类型）条件。每个参与者观看了两个简短的教学视频（一个低负荷和一个高负荷）。看完每个视频后，给出了关于这个特定视频的理解测试和三个自我报告的项目（疲劳、努力和困难）。

结果

与无意义的字幕和无字幕相比，我们报告了更多有意义的字幕的停留时间和注视次数。在高负荷条件下，观看英语课的观众比观看数学课的观众更依赖有意义的字幕。在低负荷条件下，英语课和数学课的字幕停留时间和注视次数相似。最后，在排除了之前英语和数学成绩的个体差异后，字幕没有影响理解测试成绩。

结论

与学习数学相比，英语语言学习可能更多地依赖于字幕。本研究为当前多媒体教学趋势下多媒体教材的设计提供了方向。