A Study On The Influence Of Working Memory Capacity On Avoidance In English Writing

Working memory is proposed on the basis of an experiment simulating short-term memory disorder.It is a memory system that can process and store information with limited capacity Baddeley& Hitch 1974 In recent years,working memory in the field of second language acquisition research has received widespread attention and research shows that working memory is an important cognitive factor,which leads to foreign language understanding differences.Writing,as one of the four basic skills in English learning,its relationship with the working memory capacity attracted the attention of many scholars both at home and abroad.Avoidance refers to learners in second language learning in order to avoid arcane vocabulary and structure,and choose simple words or structures Schachter 1974 According to avoidance strategy classification Brown 2002 that avoidance phenomenon can be divided into lexical avoidance,syntactic avoidance,topic avoidance and phonetic avoidance,while phonetic avoidance is irrelevant to the study,it will not be discussed in the thesis.Throughout avoidance phenomenon of related literature,the existing research on this problem more focused on qualitative research in the perspective of linguistics.Therefore,from the perspective of working memory and avoidance,this study explores the influence of working memory capacity on avoidance phenomena in second language writing.This study intends to answer the following questions:(1)What is the general situation of the avoidance phenomenon in English writing?(2)Is there any relationship between working memory and avoidance phenomena in English writing? If there is,then what is it?(3)Whether the working memory capacity has influence on lexical avoidance,syntactic avoidance and topic avoidance,and if so,which effect is most significant?The participants in this study are 80 Anfu senior high school students from Ji'an city.They have similar educational background.74 valid questionnaires were collected at last.The research tools include three parts: Reading Span Task proposed by Lesser(2007)to measure the working memory capacity,writing test which is selected from high school English composition on a given topic to test the avoidance phenomenon in the writing test,interview to make auxiliary analysis of the avoidance phenomenon.After the tests,the author collected and analyzed all the statistics by using SPSS24.0.Then put forward the research results.The research results show that:(1)Avoidance phenomena widely exist in second language writing;(2)There is a negative correlation between working memory capacity and the lexical avoidance and syntactic avoidance in second language writing,while there is no obvious relation between topic avoidance and working memory capacity.(3)In this study,working memory capacity has influences on syntactic avoidance and lexical avoidance.However it has no effect on topic avoidance.For lexical and syntactic avoidance,working memory has most significant effects on syntactic avoidance.The results of this study prove that the influence of working memory capacity has an effect on avoidance phenomenon in second language writing.It provides important data and conclusions for second language teaching,especially for writing teaching.At the same time,this paper puts forward some pedagogical suggestions for the English teaching.