The Influence Of Working Memory Capacity Upon The Output Of Second Language Writing

It has been over five decades since the term Working Memory was introduced to the academic world. Based on the theories proposed by Baddeley and Hitch in the 70s of the last century, the scholars have conducted a series of researches exploring the relation between working memory and second language acquisition including reading, writing, listening and speaking by combining the studies of the two fields, making the subject a hot issue. However, this subject which relates working memory with second language acquisition is still in its infancy in China since its introduction to the domestic academic world has only been two decades. Most of the limited studies concerning this subject in China focused on the relation between working memory and second language listening and reading, while only a few investigated the relation between working memory and second language speaking or writing. Besides, the studies also yielded different results due to the difference of methods and participants.As a result, this study chose the relation between working memory and second language writing as the subject, exploring following research questions:(1) What is the influence of working memory capacity on the accuracy, complexity and fluency of second language writing? (2) Is there a trade-off effect among the accuracy, complexity and fluency of the output of second language writing? And what is the trade-off effect in detail? 34 Chinese students with advanced English levels participated in the study by taking part in two tasks. The first one was a working memory capacity test operated on E-prime through an automated operation span task. The second one was a picture narrative task run on Inputlog and the assessment of writing included accuracy, syntactic complexity, lexical complexity and fluency. All the data was recorded in SPSS to be further analyzed.The study came to the following conclusions:(1) Working memory capacity has a significant positive influence on accuracy of the output of second language writing, and has a significant positive influence on syntactic complexity and lexical complexity of the output of second language writing, but has no significant influence on fluency of output of second language writing. (2) There is a trade-off effect between second language writing accuracy and syntactic complexity, between accuracy and fluency, a possible trade-off effect between lexical complexity and fluency, and no trade-off effect between accuracy and lexical complexity or between syntactic complexity and fluency. To explain the results and conclusions, results in the previous studies were compared. The implications of this study and future directions of this field were pointed out in the final chapter.