Influence Of Column Designing On University Students' Reading: Evidence From Eye Movement

University students are randomly selected to participate in this study, and iView X Hi-Speed Eye Tracking Systems is used as experiment instrument. With the adoption of eye movement technique, this research studies the influences of column designing on reading comprehension and eye movement pattern of Chinese university students. Based on this ground, applicable format and column designing are further studied on the part of Chinese texts, English texts, different difficulty texts and fast-reading texts. The results are as follows:1. The indexes such as reading speed, reading efficiency, the number of fixation and multiple-line regression of 1/16 format texts are significantly better than those of 1/32 format texts. For the Chinese texts, other indexes of reading comprehension and eye movement are significantly superior to the English texts apart from the reading performance. No significant results are found on the interaction of language and format to reading comprehension and eye movement indexes.2. For one-, two- and three-column texts, no significant differences are found on reading comprehension indexes but among such indexes as saccade length, number of within-line and multiple-line regression. Compared with two- and three-column text, one-column text is the best. Moreover, the number of fixation, fixation frequency, fixation duration and total regression numbers of one-column text are also better. The fixation frequency, fixation duration, saccade length and multiple-line regression of three-column texts are all inferior to one- and two-column texts. As a whole, one-column tests are better than two-column tests while two-column tests are better than three-column texts. The reading speed, the number of fixation, fixation frequency, fixation duration and the number of regression of simple texts are revealed to be better than those of difficult texts. In this study, no significant interaction is found on difficulty and column to reading comprehension indexes; nevertheless, such interaction is significant to eye movement indexes like fixation duration, the number of fixation and regression.3. The reading efficiency, saccade length and multiple-line regression numbers of one-column texts are significantly better than those of two-column. Moreover, the indexes such as reading performance, reading speed, the numbers of fixation, total regression and within-line regression of one-column texts are better than those of two-column.4. Fast reading does not influence students' reading comprehension of themes but details. Significant differences occur among such indexes as reading speed, reading efficiency, the number of fixation, fixation frequency, fixation duration, saccade length and reading pattern between fast reading groups and normal reading groups. No significant differences appeared between two-column texts and one-column texts on reading comprehension index, but on such indexes as total regression and within-line regression. The number of fixation, fixation frequency and fixation duration of two-column texts are better than one-column texts. Students from fast reading group do more frequently adopt the skipping pattern. The interaction of reading speed and column to reading comprehension and eye movement index is not significant.