The Effects Of Working Memory Capacity And Topic Familiarity On EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive meaning. It is affected by both topic familiarity and working memory capacity. Most previous studies have explored the effects of only one of the two factors; whereas little research has been conducted on how these two factors have interactively affected EFL reading comprehension. In view of this, this study aims to explore the effects of the dual-factors(working memory capacity and topic familiarity) on EFL Learners’ reading comprehension performance. The research question is as follows:1. Is there any significant effect of working memory capacity on EFL Learners’ reading comprehension performance?2. Is there any significant effect of topic familiarity on EFL Learners’ reading comprehension performance?3. Does the effect of working memory capacity on EFL Learners ’ reading comprehension performance vary according to topic familiarity?The present study is a 2(topic familiarity) ×3(working memory) mixed ANOVA design. 75 freshmen from a university of China participated in this study. All of them were between 17 and 20 years old with a mean age of 18.01. Most of them had been learning English for eight years(2 years for primary school, 6 years for high school). In this experiment, working memory capacity was a between-subject variable. Based on the results of a reading span test, the participants were divided into three groups—High WM group, Medium WM group and Low WM group. Topic familiarity was a within-subject variable. According to the result of topic familiarity questionnaire, the participants were divided into two groups, familiar and unfamiliar group. The reading comprehension passages were selected from previous CET-4 tests. Multiple choice test and recall test were used to gauge the participants’ reading comprehension performance.A series of mixed ANOVA were conducted with the data in the study. The major findings are as follows:1. Working memory capacity has a significant effect on EFL Learners’ reading comprehension performance in general. The results indicate that learners with high working memory capacity perform better in reading comprehension test than those with medium and low working memory capacity learners. There is no significant effect between medium and low working memory capacity learners. The results reveal that only when working memory capacity reaches a certain height, could their reading comprehension performance improve clearly.2. Topic familiarity has a significant effect on learners’ reading comprehension performance. It has a strong explanation power on EFL Learners’ reading comprehension performance. The results indicate that if learners are familiar to the topic of the passages, they will get better performance in L2 reading comprehension than learners with less familiar topics.3. There is a significant interaction effect between working memory capacity and topic familiarity on the participants’ reading comprehension performance in terms of multiple choice scores. However, there is no significant interaction effect between working memory capacity and topic familiarity on recall test scores. The results reveal that Medium WM group performs better than High WM group and Low WM group. A possible explanation is that participants of High WM group are easily interfered by irrelevant distracter information. Therefore, they perform worse than Medium WM group. Besides, because of the lack of processing ability and managing cognitive resources, participants of Low WM group also perform not well. On the contrary, Medium WM group members achieve a balance between both working memory capacity and topic familiarity and get success in final test.To sum up, L2 learners’ reading comprehension performance is constrained by working memory capacity, and the effects of working memory vary according to their familiarity with the topics. These results lend support to working memory theory and schema theory. This study also has several pedagogical implications. First, since the capacity of working memory is very hard to handling, teachers can use other manners to improve students’ automation degree of second language input processing, such as popularize the extra-curricular knowledge to students, enhance their familiarity of topic, etc. Second, since the capacity of working memory can reflect student’s English level to some extent, during the instruction of L2 reading, teachers should be devoted in fostering students’ working memory capacity consciously.