A Study On The Correlation Between EFL Learners’ English Working Memory Capacity And Their English Writing Ability

Working memory is a cognitive system responsible for information storage and information processing,which has limited capacity and plays quite an important role in human cognitive activities.The working memory aroused widespread interest of the second language acquisition researchers since it has been introduced into the second language field by McLaughlin and Skehan(Wen,2007).Writing,as one of the most significant cognitive activities of human beings,the relationship between it and working memory has attracted more and more attention.A lot of domestic and foreign researchers have designed various experiments to measure the working memory capacity,exploring how individual differences in working memory affect the second language acquisition and output from different point of views.For example,Mota(2003)focused on the role of working memory in spoken language output;Li Hong(2003)investigated the effect of working memory on learners’ second language vocabulary acquisition;Chen Baoguo and Gao Yiwen(2009)studied the influence of working memory on English learners’ syntactic acquisition and Chen Baoguo and Xu Huihui(2010)explored the influence of working memory on processing of ambiguous sentences.Dai Yuncai(2014)conducted a study on working memory,foreign language learning ability and syntactic processing.Studies on how working memory affects written language are relatively few and the representative researchers are Kellogg(1999;2004)and Bergsleithner(2010).Most empirical studies on the relationship between working memory and the second language acquisition abroad chose learners whose mother tongue was not Chinese as subjects,which can notprovide strong evidence for the second language acquisition of learners from China.From the perspective of domestic research,the study on correlations between working memory and language acquisition is at the stage of beginning,and those research results are different because there are differences in research methods and subject characteristics.Therefore,more empirical researches are needed to explore the influence of working memory capacity on the second language learners’ writing.The present empirical study aims at investigating the way working memory capacity affects writing accuracy,complexity and fluency of English learners from China.This study chooses 18 junior students majoring in English from Shanxi Normal University as subjects,exploring the relationship between their English working memory capacity and English writing ability.The research questions are(1)Is there any relationship between EFL learners’ English working memory capacity and their writing accuracy?(2)Is there any relationship between EFL learners’ English working memory capacity and their writing fluency?(3)Is there any relationship between EFL learners’ English working memory capacity and their writing complexity?(4)If the writing task is associated with the materials of working memory capacity span test,do the subjects perform better?There are two tests in this study,one is used to test the subjects’ working memory capacity and the other is to test subjects’ English writing ability.All collected data are analyzed by SPSS 13.0 and research questions are discussed on the basis of data analysis.The research results show that:(1)English learners’ working memory capacity is positively related to their writing accuracy.(2)English Learners’ working memory capacity is not related to their writing fluency.(3)English learners’ working memory capacity is positively related to their writing complexity.(4)The subjects perform better in the writing task related to test materials of working memory capacity than in the other writing task.The present research results provide empirical support for the relationship between English learners’ English working memory capacity and their writing ability,and provide a new thought for English teaching,teachers can adopt different teaching methods according to students’ working memory characteristics.