An analysis of reading process based on real-time eye-tracking data with web-camera-Focus on English reading at higher education level

Reading skill, an important and complex cognitive ability, is one of the target skills for talent training. Especially with the trend of online learning becoming more and more prevalent, digital reading literacy is a necessary skill for learners. Therefore, many researchers started to focus on study reading process, and study methods are diverse, such as by collecting eye movement data. However, most researches were limited to scope of laboratory, so it is difficult to achieve low-cost, large-scale, non-invasive and objective reading process data collection and analysis. Therefore, this research developed a platform using web camera of laptop and open-source eye tracking library (webgazer.js) to get physiological indicators based on eye tracking data, which can be used to analyze reading process and explore the impact of the reading performance. This research also used inferential statistics and machine learning methods to quantitatively characterize and analyze the relationship between reading behavior and reading performance. This study's conclusions can help make subsequent targeted adjustments and interventions to improve learners' reading performance, and prove the usability for collecting eye-tracking data by platform with web-camera.