Lexical Approach To Lightening The Burden On Working Memory To Improve Reading Comprehension

This thesis examines the problem of inefficient reading comprehension with non-English major college students, and tackles the problem with the teaching method of integrating grammatical information into lexicon teaching. The underlying idea is that working memory, whose core characteristic is its severely limited capacity, is of vital importance to language comprehension, and that the process of lexical retrieval from the permanent memory is much easier than the process of working our way through a syntactic structure. Therefore a hypothesis is formulated that to purposely increase the readers' awareness of storing grammatical information in the lexicon will bring about an increased speed, hence improved reading performance. Through careful design of the experiment, the writer proves that this method can lighten the burden on working memory, which consequently brings about significantly improved reading comprehension.