Benchmarking the levels of the reading passages used in teaching Turkish as a foreign language : Eye tracking findings during reading

Eye tracking methodology has been widely used by the psycholinguists who have been trying to observe the cognitive process during reading. This methodology prominently differs from the traditional methods as it is conducive to record the cognitive process and gives the chance to the researchers to conduct observational research by the interfaces. The movements of the human eye as they are called fixation, saccade, regressive saccade and return swap provide information based on cognitive process of the reader. This dissertation which hade been planned through the instruments of eye tracking methodology as a validation study for Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language revealed the Turkish reading performances of the participants as they demonstrated similarities and dissimilarities; besides, the reading passages built on the criteria of the CEFR by different institutions were objectively analyzed with the variables of eye tracking methodology in the framework of the eye-mind theory. The data received for this study was acquired from eye tracking methodology based on observational values and the results based on the corpus research.