A Study Of The Effect Of Working Memory Capacity On English Majors’ English Written Production

Working memory is a construct belonging to cognitive psychology. Workingmemory can store information and process information simultaneously. In recentyears, working memory has attracted more and more attentions and has become afocus in applied linguistics. By now, many studies have been done about the effect ofworking memory on sentence comprehension, reading comprehension or listeningcomprehension. However, there are very few studies concerning the relationshipbetween working memory and written language production.With theories of working memory and writing processes, the thesis aims atstudying the relationship between working memory capacity and written languageperformance of Chinese English majors in University. The study intends to answertwo research questions. On one hand, it intends to find out if students’ workingmemory capacity affects their English written production’s accuracy, fluency, andcomplexity, and if it does, how it affects. On the other hand, the study wants to testwhether there is “trade-off effect” in English written production, if there is, how theworking memory affects the “trade-off effect”.To answer the research questions, an empirical study is conducted.45studentstook part in the study, which focuses on the individual differences of working memorycapacity and aims at finding out how they affect students’ written languageperformance. The results of the present study show that, generally speaking, theindividual differences of working memory capacity influence written languageproduction’s accuracy obviously. However, individual differences of working memory capacity affect written language written language production’s fluency but not toomuch and don’t have obvious effect on the complexity of written language production,especially in HWMC group and MWMC group. Besides, the study has proved theexistence of the “trade-off” effect in written language production because the accuracy,fluency, and complexity of it compete for the notice recourses. Among them, thetrade-off between fluency and lexical complexity is the most obvious.Based on the above results, some pedagogical implications are given to teachersand students on how to improve written language performance.