Effects Of Task Types And Working Memory Span On Students’ CET-4 Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is more and more valued in EFL teaching and learning, but it is still the Chinese EFL students’ weakness. While working memory span has been a hot topic in the field of psycholinguistic research in recent years, most studies have explored the correlation of or difference in the performances of subjects with difference ranges of working memory span in their processing of Chinese or English. Some researches examine the predictability of working memory span on subjects’ listening comprehension performances. Few scholars were concerned about the relationship between task types and listening comprehension performance, nor did they discuss the correlation between subjects’ working memory span and their listening comprehension performance across language proficiency level groups.This study aims to detect the effects of task types and working memory span on students’ CET-4 listening comprehension performance, focusing on four research questions. The first concerns the subjects’ differences in working memory span across language proficiency level groups; the second deals with the relationship of task types on listening comprehension; the third explores the correlation of subjects’ individual differences of working memory span for the their listening comprehension performances; and the fourth question examines the relationship between working memory span and task types.247 non-English majors were selected as subjects to participate the research in a working memory span test and a model test of listening comprehension of CET-4 were used as the instrument for data collection in this study. The subjects’ scores of CET-4 real test, which took place two weeks later, were used as the subjects’ language proficiency data. Finally, only 205 subjects had complete and valid scores. Therefore, their data were used for statistical analysis. Then the results of descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation coefficients and the results of One-Way ANOVA are calculated with the help of SPSS 19.0. The main conclusions are as follows. The correlation between working memory span and language proficiency is significant. The higher the language proficiency is, the larger the working memory span is. The effects of task types on the subjects’ listening comprehension performance are not significant for high language proficiency subjects. But it’s significant for low language proficiency subjects. Working memory span and listening comprehension performance are significantly correlated in different language proficiency groups. The correlation in high language proficiency group is the strongest and in low group weak. There are significant correlations between task types and working memory span. The degree of correlation is related to the variation of complexity of various tasks.According to the design, implementation and results of this study, the author proposes some suggestions to improve students’ working memory span and listening comprehension performance, and points out the limitations of this study, as a reference to future research.