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.

Eye-tracking approach allows us to collect and analyze data for a wide range of measures of eye-movements, to relate these to language processing, and to have insight of language processing (Conklin, Pellicer-Sánchez, and Carrol, 2018). The current study aims to investigate how ESL university students process the sentences with complex noun phrases modified by relative clauses. Two types of sentences with complex noun phrases were examined: complex noun phrases modified by relative clauses located in a sentence subject (syntactic-based processing) and those located in a sentence object (semantic-based processing). In total, 32 EFL university students participated in this study. Fixation count, regression rate, first reading time, and total reading time of areas of interest were examined. The eye-tracking results showed that the participants showed significantly higher regression rates on noun 2 than noun 1 in both types of complex noun phrases. In terms of verb selection, however, the results showed contrasting aspects : noun 1(verb 1 selection) preference in syntactic-based processing whereas noun 2(verb 2 selection) preference in semantic-based processing,