On The Effects Of Lexical Approach On English Reading Comprehension For Non-English Major Students

English reading comprehension is the psychological process of absorbing andtransforming information. Its purpose is to search for information. English reading isnot simply to input information, what’s more, to process and reorganize theinformation which has been stored in reader’s mind. As for Chinese college students,English reading is not only the end of English learning, but also the means of it.English reading comprehension is the key criterion to evaluate English learner’soverall level. It is also one of the most important activities in college English teaching.How we can improve college students’ English reading competence is a difficult pointin college English teaching all the time.The dissertation presents a study of the relationship between lexical approachand reading comprehension for non-English major students. Working memory is theactivated portion of long-term memory and plays an important role in readingcomprehension. According to the capacity theory of sentence comprehension, thehigher the working memory capacity is, the higher the reading comprehension abilityis.This study explores the effect of lexical approach on reading comprehensionfrom the perspective of working memory. On the basis of information-processingtheory and the capacity theory of sentence comprehension and empirical evidenceconcerning lexical approach, the author points out the hypotheses of this study: it isassumed that lexical approach correlate significantly with reading comprehensionfrom the perspective of cognitive psychology, that is, lexical approach can improvelearners’ working memory capacity and learners with higher working memory capacity own higher ability of reading comprehension, whereas their lower workingmemory capacity counterparts do not. In a word, the lexical approach can improve thereading comprehension ability.The research employs the empirical method.80subjects of the research areselected from two classes of non-English major freshmen of Shenyang NormalUniversity. Class One is the control group and Class Two is the experiment group. Inthe experiment, lexical approach is taught in the class. Before and after the experiment,the two classes were required to take the reading span test and the English readingcomprehension test, and the results show that the lexical approach can improve thereading comprehension ability from the perspective of working memory. And thepaper proposes some implications: creating associations between old words and newwords; emphasizing the input of background knowledge of vocabulary; trainingstudents’ self-learning ability.