Difficulty and complexity of pragmatic comprehension tasks: an eye-tracking pilot study of advanced Polish users of English

This study examined the complexity and difficulty of pragmatic comprehension in reading tasks introduced to 30 English L2 students (Polish L1 users) of undergraduate studies in English philology. In the context of L2 language learning, task complexity is defined as the demands imposed by a task’s linguistic complexity, and difficulty as learners’ perceptions of the demands imposed by tasks. The three reading tasks included speech acts of apologizing, requesting, and complimenting. The study involved assessing the readability measures of the task in Text Inspector and Grammarly, eye-tracked measures of total fixation durations, average and the sum of fixation counts for each word and the whole task, re-reading ratio, total duration of interest, total reading duration recorded by Tobii Pro X3-120, and a mini post-task interview transcribed by Sonix. The preliminary findings show that tasks rated as lexically and structurally easy by both students and automated tools (Grammarly and Text Inspector) nevertheless elicit oculomotor behaviour that reflects complex processing demands for the average reader. There seems to be a lack of metapragmatic awareness among advanced Polish speakers of English, which is essential to choosing correct answers and making pragmatic inferences from texts.