A Study Of The Correlation Between Chinese EFL Learners' Capacity Of Short-term Memory/working Memory And English Reading Comprehension

More and more researchers in second language acquisition field have paid much attention to memory,a term from psychology,which contributes to an interdisciplinary subject engaging both linguistics and psychology.Short-term memory plays the role of storing information contemporarily,while working memory,the activating part of long-term memory,has the functions of both information processing and storage.An abundance of studies at home and abroad have correlated short-term memory/working memory to L2 reading comprehension.The important role of memory in L2 reading comprehension is confirmed.But the correlation between short-term memory/working memory and L2 reading comprehension is moderately positively significant,which is less significant than that between the knowledge of languages such as vocabulary and grammar and L2 reading comprehension.Additionally,it is hard for L2 learners to reach the proficiency level of the native speakers,so working memory in L2 affects their L2 acquisition and using more than L1 working memory.Hence,working memory tasks in the present study are measured in L2.The purpose of the study is to explore the correlation between Chinese EFL learners' capacity of short-term memory/working memory and English reading comprehension.The research questions are addressed below.(1)What is the capacity of Chinese EFL learners' short-term memory andworking memory respectively?(2)What is the correlation between the capacity of short-term memory andEnglish reading comprehension?(3)What is the correlation between the capacity of working memory and Englishreading comprehension?(4)To what extent is English reading comprehension predicted by Chinese EFL learners' capacity of short-term memory and working memory respectively?The present study chose 69 postgraduates(8 male and 61 female)majoring in English of a “211 Project” university in Suzhou as the subjects,and tested their short-term memory/working memory capacity and English reading comprehension through 4 memory tests(digit span task,letter span task,operation span task and reading span task)presented by timed Microsoft Power Point(25 minutes)and one English reading comprehension with 16 questions chosen from IELTS(20 minutes).The findings are summarized below after a careful study.Firstly,the mean of the short-term memory capacity of the subjects is 0.808,while the mean of the working memory capacity of the subjects is 0.581.Therefore,the subjects' capacity of short-term memory is higher than that of working memory.However,WMC has higher variability(SD=0.152)than STMC(SD=0.118).Therefore,WMC can better demonstrate the differences among subjects.Secondly,the English reading comprehension test scores have positive but non-significant correlation with short-term memory capacity.Thirdly,working memory capacity significantly positively correlates to the reading comprehension test scores.Fourthly,working memory capacity serves as a significant predictor of the performance in English reading comprehension.But short-term memory capacity cannot predict the performance in English reading comprehension.What's more,among the four memory tasks,only reading span task can significantly predict the performance in reading comprehension.The findings of the present study are expected to shed some light on English learning and teaching in China.