The Perceptual Span Of Fifth Graders In English Reading And Its Implications For English Teaching

English is a required curriculum in China’s basic education and the research on the rules of the students’ English learning has important practical value to formulate scientific and reasonable training methods to improve the students’ reading efficiency.The perceptual span is the essential issue in reading.With the popularity of English in China and its application in early education,many academics have already studied the perceptual span of reading in China,while the experiments have not been done in primary school.The perceptual span is the area of effective vision that can be obtained in every fixation of the reading processing. Compared with the research in China,foreign study in perceptual span is earlier and more systemic.The research in China on the perceptual span began to develop in recent years.Eyelink-2000eye tracker and the eye-movement-contingent display change technique were used in this study to explore the perceptual span of Chinese fifth graders in reading English. The experiment is a repeated measurement experiment of single factor that sets six different window size to record24participants’ eye movements as they were reading.24participants were randomly assigned to the the six different window conditions.The study finally choose four variables to discuss the experimental results: forward saccade length,mean fixation duration, fixation count, reading rate.The study found that the English perceptual span of the Chinese fifth graders was5-8character spaces to the right of the fixation.