The present study attempts to make a link between eye movement measures and reading comprehension (RC) to further examine how reading span (RS) differences contribute to differences in L2 reading performance. The variability of text processing was measured by duration and frequency of fixations using an eye tracker. Thus, it investigates the effects of RS in terms of processing as well as RC performance. To this end, forty-five Korean undergraduate students at an intermediate level participated in the experiment. Four types of eye movements were tracked: first-fixation time (FFT), total-fixation time (TFT), secondfixation time (SFT), and fixation count (FC). The results showed that the high-RS group received higher scores than the low-RS group on the RC test, suggesting a significant role of RS in RC performance. In addition, significant differences between the RS groups were found in TFT and SFT. RC performance is negatively correlated with the TFT and SFT. Due to their limited RS, the low-RS group needed more time for comprehension and left few resources available for integration of meaning in the text. The findings suggest that fast and efficient EMs are closely associated with a better RC performance. The present study shed light on how RS affects the students’ text processing and that, in turn, leads them to different outcomes from the L2 reading comprehension tests.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of visual input enhancement (VIE) of target forms and deliberate attention on grammar learning and reading comprehension of Korean high school students. In Experiment 1, eighty-eight students read one of the three experimental texts: (i) BT (baseline text), (ii) VIE (BT with the target forms visually enhanced), and (iii) VIE-Attention (VIE with explicit instruction asking students to pay deliberate attention to both the target forms and reading comprehension). After reading, the students responded to grammar and reading comprehension tests. The results showed that only VIE-Attention promoted grammar learning, while both the VIE and VIE-Attention significantly impaired reading comprehension. In Experiment 2, an eye tracker was used in order to further probe the effects of VIE and deliberate attention. The results revealed that the VIE and VIEAttention groups fixated longer and more often than those in the BT group and that the VIE and VIE-Attention groups performed better in the grammar test and poorer on the reading comprehension test than the BT group. The present study makes significant contributions to the VIE literature since it provides the first eye movement data elucidating the effects of VIE.

The present study aims to investigate how well Google Voice Actions, an automatic speech recognition system, recognizes Korean young English learners’ pronunciation of English words. To achieve this aim, the current study arranged for 18 Korean elementary school students to pronounce 219 English words and recorded their pronunciation. Then, the intelligibility of their pronunciation was measured using Google Voice Actions. The current study analyzed the measured intelligibility of Google Voice Actions in terms of the phonemic difficulty and familiarity the learners have with the words. The phonemic difficulty of each word was labelled as Group 1 to 5, depending on the number of difficult phonemic elements it contains. The familiarity of each word was also measured through a questionnaire. The findings revealed that the accuracy in Google Voice Actions’ recognition was closely related to the students’the phonemic difficulties and familiarity of the words. Interestingly, the pronunciation of words in Group 5 gained the highest recognition scores and that of Group 1 the second highest scores. Those of Group 2, 3, and 4 recorded lower recognition scores than the two groups. These results suggest that the more phonemic information the pronunciation of a word provides, the more relevant clues would be available for Google Voice Actions. This increases the possibility of successful search from the speech database.