Teacher monitoring pair and group work in English as a foreign language lessons: insights from an eye-tracking study

In the last two decades, considerable research has focused on what teachers find important when observing classroom situations. Many terms have been used (noticing, ability to notice, professional vision) and many research methods have been employed. Recently, teacher’s professional vision has been explored with the use of eye-tracking. Teachers’ gaze has been investigated e.g. when observing a classroom video or during instruction in simplified settings (Sturmer et al., 2017). In our research, we focus on teachers’ gaze in natural classroom settings. In this poster we address how a teacher distributes his gaze when monitoring pair and group work in English as a foreign language (EFL) lessons and present the results of a pilot study. Data was collected using SMI wireless eye-tracking glasses (60Hz) in three 7th grade EFL lessons of a male EFL teacher. As additional context data, we asked the teacher to comment selected sequences of the gaze replay to gain a deeper insight. The data is being analysed using BeGaze software focussing on the frequency and duration of fixations on selected areas of interest (students, instructional materials …).