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How do L1 glosses affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance? An eye-tracking study

  • Lingshan Huang and Jingyang Jiang EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 20, 2024
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

This study employed eye-tracking technology to examine how English as a foreign language learners at different proficiency levels process L1-glossed words and how this processing relates to L2 reading comprehension. Forty-seven university students were divided into a higher-proficiency group (n = 23) and a lower-proficiency group (n = 24) based on their L2 proficiency. Both groups were asked to read an English passage with L1 (Chinese) glosses. Their eye movements were recorded with an eye-tracker as they read. After reading, they were immediately given a reading comprehension test. Analyses of the eye-tracking data showed that the higher-proficiency L2 learners spent more time on unfamiliar words than the lower-proficiency L2 learners. Furthermore, lower-proficiency L2 learners’ longer processing time on glossed unfamiliar words was related to their higher reading comprehension scores, whereas this relationship was not found in the higher-proficiency group. These results revealed that the contribution of L1 glosses to L2 reading comprehension performance varied across L2 learners’ proficiency levels. Our findings have important implications for second language instruction.

Keywords: proficiency levels; unfamiliar word processing; L1 glosses; L2 reading comprehension; eye movements
Corresponding author: Jingyang Jiang, Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, No. 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, 310058, China, E-mail:

Funding source: the Humanities and Social Science Foundation of Zhejiang University of Technology

Award Identifier / Grant number: SKY-ZX-20240005

Funding source: the MOE Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universities in China, “Data-driven Studies of the Development of Foreign Language Capacityâ€

Award Identifier / Grant number: 22JJD740018

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jinghui Ouyang and all of the participants, without whom this work would not be possible.

  1. Research funding: This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Science Foundation of Zhejiang University of Technology [grant number SKY-ZX-20240005], and the MOE Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universities in China, “Data-driven Studies of the Development of Foreign Language Capacity”[grant number 22JJD740018]. We are grateful to these funders for their generous support.

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Received: 2023-06-25
Accepted: 2024-04-24
Published Online: 2024-08-20

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0091
Keywords for this article
proficiency levels; unfamiliar word processing; L1 glosses; L2 reading comprehension; eye movements

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  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2024
  4. Phonetics & Phonology
  5. The role of recoverability in the implementation of non-phonemic glottalization in Hawaiian
  6. Epenthetic vowel quality crosslinguistically, with focus on Modern Hebrew
  7. Japanese speakers can infer specific sub-lexicons using phonotactic cues
  8. Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection
  9. Investigating the acoustic fidelity of vowels across remote recording methods
  10. The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study
  11. Tracking phonological regularities: exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning
  12. Morphology & Syntax
  13. #AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets
  14. The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations
  15. A refinement of the analysis of the resultative V-de construction in Mandarin Chinese
  16. L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions
  17. Semantics & Pragmatics
  18. “All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
  19. Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic
  20. Constructing elderly patients’ agency through conversational storytelling
  21. Language Documentation & Typology
  22. Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form
  23. The syntax of African American English borrowings in the Louisiana Creole tense-mood-aspect system
  24. Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations
  25. Bibliographic bias and information-density sampling
  26. Historical & Comparative Linguistics
  27. Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution
  28. Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity
  29. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
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  32. Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns
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  36. Modeling L2 motivation change and its predictive effects on learning behaviors in the extramural digital context: a quantitative investigation in China
  37. Ongoing exposure to an ambient language continues to build implicit knowledge across the lifespan
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  39. The acquisition of speaking fundamental frequency (F0) features in Cantonese and English by simultaneous bilingual children
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  58. Could this be next for corpus linguistics? Methods of semi-automatic data annotation with contextualized word embeddings
  59. The Red Hen Audio Tagger
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