A Study On The Relationship Between Working Memory And English Reading Comprehension Of Chinese Undergraduates

As one of the most fundamental skills in English learning,English reading not only plays a crucial role in enhancing the comprehensive language proficiency of students,but also is essential for the cultivation of students' critical thinking and international perspective.However,there are quite a few deficiencies in English reading teaching in China.The teaching of English reading frequently only stays at the level of linguistic knowledge without paying attention to the deeper level of cognitive factors.Thus,it is necessary to improve English reading teaching in this area.Working memory is a capacity-limited system which provides storage and processing of the information necessary for some intricate cognitive tasks.Reading comprehension,as a kind of complicated cognitive task,always requires information storage and processing simultaneously.Therefore,the study of reading comprehension has been related to working memory gradually.Since the 1980s,an increasing number of researchers have begun exploring the relationship between working memory and reading comprehension performance.Initially,by applying working memory capacity task,foreign researchers have observed the relationship between working memory and first language reading comprehension.And great success has been achieved in this field.Until the 1990s,researchers abroad began to study the role that working memory played in foreign language reading comprehension.Consequently,most studies at home started to concentrate on the relationship between working memory and Chinese reading comprehension firstly.Whereas,there are few domestic researches paying attention to the relationship between working memory and foreign language reading comprehension.More precisely,researchers both abroad and at home have not reached an agreement on the relationship between working memory and foreign language reading comprehension.In addition,the role and the relationship between the storage and processing capacity of working memory are debatable.As a result,it is necessary to carry out more empirical studies at home to provide evidence for these unsolved issues.This study aims to investigate the relationship between working memory and English reading comprehension of Chinese undergraduates so as to guide the English teaching in China further.As an empirical research,the present study applies two experiments on 80 English-major sophomores in Shaanxi Normal University.One is working memory capacity task designed to measure subjects' working memory.The other is English reading comprehension task intended to examine the reading comprehension performance of subjects.After collecting experimental data,SPSS 17.0 is applied to analyze the experimental results.The following findings are obtained after data analysis and discussion.Firstly,working memory has high and positive relationship with Chinese undergraduates'English reading comprehension performance.Secondly,both the storage capacity and the processing capacity are correlated with English reading comprehension of Chinese undergraduates and the processing capacity has much greater effect.Lastly,the task-switching hypothesis is more authentic to illustrate the relationship between the storage capacity and the processing capacity of working memory since the trade-off between them has not been found.In short,most of the previous researches solely emphasize the relationship between working memory and foreign language reading comprehension.Whereas,the present study not only observes the relationship between working memory and English reading comprehension,but also it explores the relationship between the storage capacity and the processing capacity of working memory further.