Vocabulary Knowledge, Grammatical Knowledge, Working Memory And Efl Reading Comprehension

As one of the five basic language skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translation, reading comprehension plays a significant role in learners'language proficiency and accounts for a large proportion in many examinations. There are various factors that contribute to reading comprehension. These factors can be categorized into two aspects: reader variables and text variables. But most of the previous studies only focus on one factor. This study is designed to investigate the effects of the three factors on reading comprehension—vocabulary knowledge, grammatical knowledge and working memory, and try to find out which one serves as the best predictor.The participants in the present study are 33 freshman students majoring in Acupuncture in Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and they are taking English courses in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. All of them have taken test of receptive vocabulary, test of productive vocabulary, grammatical knowledge test, working memory capacity test, and reading comprehension test. The major findings of the study are briefed as follows:First, there exists positive correlation between receptive vocabulary size and EFL reading comprehension performance; receptive vocabulary can account for 14.5% of the variance of reading comprehension performance. While no significant correlation is found between productive vocabulary size and reading comprehension performance.Second, grammatical knowledge significantly correlates with EFL reading comprehension performance, and it is found to be responsible for 41.6% of the variance of reading comprehension performance.Third, working memory plays an important role in EFL reading comprehension, and it can predict EFL reading comprehension performance in a proportion of 31.3%. Fourth, the Regression Analysis and the One-Way ANOVA Analysis indicate that grammatical knowledge is the most effective predictor for EFL reading comprehension performance.Finally, the implications of this study are presented. The responsibility of language teachers in EFL situation is not only to help students improve their vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, but also pay attention to developing working memory capacity in classroom activities.