Tracking eye movements to gain insights into an older reader's reading practices

Perhaps you've met Patrick? Patrick (pseudonym) is in Year 5. He is a reader who struggles to cope with the reading demands of the Year 5 classroom. His teacher reports he is reluctant to read any genre of text, refuses to read aloud with the teacher or with another support person and becomes quite agitated when he encounters something he does not know in his reading. The reading challenges Patrick faces are more common in an emergent reader, but perhaps more difficult to address with an older reader where ineffective practices have become learned. In this paper, we share the case of Patrick, a Year 5 student participant in our EMMA project. EMMA is an acronym combining eye movement technology (EM) with miscue analysis (MA), an established reading assessment for understanding the way a reader orchestrates the reading process. Here, we consider what we can learn from the analysis of Patrick's miscues, from the retell accompanying that reading, and what is added when we have the opportunity to understand the ways Patrick uses his eyes as part of that meaning making process.