On The Correlation Between Working Memory And English Proficiency Of English Majors

Working memory, an important factor which has a direct influence on the complex cognitive activities, has always been a most important subject for the psychologists. With the rise of psycholinguistics, an increasing number of scientists commence to pay close attention to the role of various psychological mechanisms in language studies. Large numbers of studies, for a period of long time, have been made to explore the relationship between working memory and foreign language learning, but most of them are too general, as a most important part of English learners, the English major students are often ignored, and studies of testing working memory capacity of English majors are rarely seen, neither are studies of correlation between working memory and English proficiency. This paper, therefore, explores working memory in two levels, firstly, a revised version of software for reading span test is developed by the author based on former studies, it is designed especially to test the working memory capacity of sophomore English majors, then a highly organized reading span test is performed to explore the possibility of correlation between working memory capacity and English proficiency, as TEM4is designed to evaluate the learning of the English majors in the first two years’ study, the individual performances in TEM4is considered as the subjects’ English proficiency in this paper. The outcome of the test shows that working memory has a direct influence to TEM4performance, identifying that higher working memory capacity results in a better outcome in TEM4. It also shows that the new designed software for reading span test has a good reliability and validity, and the principle of this research can also be applied to both English teaching and learning in the college English classroom.