A Study On The Correlation Between EFL Learners’ English Working Memory Capacity And Their English Reading Comprehension Ability

Working memory is a capacity-limited cognitive system which undertakes both information storage and processing tasks and plays a vital role in human’s cognitive activities. And reading comprehension is one of human’s important cognitive activities. The correlation between working memory capacity and reading comprehension has attracted ever-growing attention. Their correlation was firstly studied abroad. Researchers designed a variety of experiments to measure the working memory capacity and attempted to prove the existence of the correlation between working memory and reading comprehension of mother language (English). Their research laid a foundation for the study on the correlation between working memory capacity and reading comprehension. Then, the researchers at home started to pay close attention to the effect of working memory capacity on reading comprehension. But they focused mainly on the correlation between Chinese working memory capacity and complex sentence comprehension. Studies on the correlation between English working memory and English reading comprehension are relatively few and studies on the further correlation between them are fewer. What’s more, the correlation between the storage function and the processing function of working memory is still unclear. Therefore, more experiments should be conducted to detect whether their relationship is resource-sharing or task-switching.In the present study,92third year English majors in Chengdu Institute Sichuan International Studies University were chosen as the subjects and empirical approach was adopted to answer the following three questions:(1) Is there any correlation between EFL learners’English working memory and their English reading comprehension?(2) If they are correlated with each other, which part of working memory has greater effect on reading comprehension ability? And which part of reading comprehension is more greatly affected by working memory capacity?(3) What is the correlation between the storage task and processing task of working memory? The present study involves two tests, including one computerized reading span test and one English reading comprehension test. The former is designed to measure the subjects’English working memory capacity, and the latter is intended to detect the subjects’ English reading comprehension ability. The collected data will be analyzed by Software Statistics Package for Social Science (SPSS19.0) and discussions will be conducted based on those data analyses.The results of the present study show (1) there is a strongly positive correlation between EFL learners’ English working memory capacity and English reading comprehension ability;(2) Both the storage task and the processing task are correlated with the subjects’reading comprehension ability and the processing task has much greater effect. The effect of working memory is chiefly on the logical aspect of reading comprehension;(3) The correlation between the storage and the processing tasks of English working memory is indirect and the task-switching hypothesis is more reliable to explain the correlation between them.The present study provides some empirical materials for the study on the correlation between working memory capacity and reading comprehension ability. It explores and detects the further relationship between them. The correlation between the storage task and the processing task is also emphasized.