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Speaker's Abstract

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Jookyoung Jung
Associate Professor
Department of English, Faculty of Arts
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Title:
"Temporality matters: Audio-synchronous textual enhancement as an attention trigger and shaper in reading-while-listening"
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Recent research has increasingly examined second language (L2) learning through reading-while-listening (Webb & Chang, 2012), as auditory support accompanying text is expected to facilitate comprehension and the establishment of new form–meaning mappings. The connected speech stream, in particular, may help learners identify phraseological units more readily, promoting collocation learning (Conklin et al., 2020). To further enhance this potential, textual enhancement has been incorporated into reading-while-listening tasks (e.g., Vu & Peters, 2022), yet findings remain inconsistent. Against this background, this study investigated the effectiveness of two types of textual enhancement (henceforth, TE), i.e., static highlighting and audio-synchronous highlighting (Jung & Lee, 2023), in facilitating collocational learning during reading-while-listening.

 

A total of 102 Cantonese EFL learners read and listened to two English short stories containing 12 adjective–pseudonoun collocations. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: unenhanced text, static TE (collocations highlighted in advance), or synchronous TE (collocations highlighted in synchronization with the narrator’s reading). Eye movements of all participants were recorded using EyeLink 1000 Plus. In addition, six participants from each group (n = 18) produced stimulated recall comments prompted by their own eye‑movements, while the remaining participants (n = 84) completed immediate and two-week delayed pseudonoun and collocation recognition and recall tests.

 

The results showed that static TE increased total fixation counts on the target adjectives and pseudonouns. In contrast, synchronous TE promoted second-pass reading time and total fixation duration on the pseudonouns. Also, static TE led to significant gains in semantic recall and delayed collocation recall, while synchronous TE produced more consistent improvements in the receptive and productive knowledge about the target collocations in both the immediate and delayed posttests. Both TE techniques were shown to flatten the attention–learning relationship. Stimulated recalls suggested that synchronous TE encouraged attentive reading aligned with the audio, whereas static TE supported more selective reading.

 

The findings of this study underscore the need to consider the temporal dimension of TE in reading-while-listening, as it may not only trigger visual attention to the target features but also shape the level of engagement with the enhanced features. 

Jookyoung Jung is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She also serves as the Director of the MA program in Applied English Linguistics. She has conducted research projects exploring task effects on real-time reading and writing processes using eye-tracking technology and keystroke-logging software. More recently, Dr. Jung has expanded her research into technology-mediated L2 learning, investigating areas such as video-conferenced collaborative L2 writing, gaze-contingent attention-triggering intervention, and text-audio synchronized input enhancement techniques. Her research has also delved into L2 pragmatic competence and learning, including studies on L2 users' suggestion-giving abilities, comprehension of textual English jokes, and understanding L2 English irony. Additionally, Dr. Jung explores the moderating effects of learners' cognitive abilities, such as language aptitude, working memory capacity, and attention control.
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