Second and foreign language research has investigated how learners process and comprehend written texts. In recent years, eye tracking has gained prominence as a method that allows for the collection of rich data during natural reading. Nevertheless, there is still a shortage of benchmark data for the eye movement behavior of second and foreign language readers, including Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). To address this need, this study aimed to gather extensive eye-tracking data from Japanese EFL learners during passage reading and depict the typical patterns of their global eye movement behavior. In this article, we report the descriptive statistical information of the six passage-level eye-tracking measures: number of fixations, total reading time, mean fixation duration, mean saccade length, skipping frequency, and regression frequency. Additionally, we examined how these measures were associated with text difficulty and learners’ English reading proficiency. The results indicated that more readable text and higher proficiency were associated with a small number of fixations, shorter total reading times, and less frequent regressions, supporting the cognitive validity of the eye-tracking data collected. The eye-tracking data presented here are made openly available for further research on EFL reading.
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