Influence Of Working Memory Capacity On Avoidance In English Writing For Chinese High School Students

Most avoidance phenomena exist in the process of second language learning, which results infossilization and hinders the improving of learners’ second language level. Whereas modern studieson avoidance phenomena are mainly qualitative analysis from linguistic perspectives. From apsychological and cognitive perspective, this study discusses the influence of individual differencein working memory capacity on second language avoidance phenomenon to try to find theprofound reason accounting for this phenomenon and offers some practical advice for China’ssecond language teaching and learning.72students studying in Grade Two senior high school are selected as subjects. After rejectinginvalid experiments materials,65sets of materials are collected finally. This study uses RST(reading span task) to measure subjects’working memory capacity. When naming higher and lowerworking memory capacity groups, the researcher refers to the standard marks of subjects’ Englishtesting to minimize the difference of English competence. Eventually the study gets a higherworking memory capacity group and a lower group containing15subjects separated. Then amixture analysis are carried out,2(higher working memory capacity group and lowergroup)×3(vocabulary avoidance, sentence pattern avoidance, and pragmatic avoidance). Data onvocabulary avoidance and sentence pattern avoidance are collected from the subjects’ English testwriting materials, while data on pragmatic avoidance are collected by using questionnaires.Analysis of correlation and linear relation between the data of working memory and avoidancephenomenon are conducted.This study gets the following conclusions: a. avoidance phenomena exist in most of thesubjects’ second language writing; b. there is a negative correlation between subjects’difference inworking memory capacity and their vocabulary avoidance and sentence pattern avoidance insecond language writing; c. there is no obvious relation between subjects’ difference in workingmemory capacity and their pragmatic avoidance, so the researcher suggests that a further study onoral English shall be done.