A Study On The Correlation Between Working Memory Capacity And English Writing Performance Of Chinese English Majors

As an important cognitive factor,working memory is correlated with writing,a complicated cognitive activity which requires having adequate cognitive abilities.Till now,various studies have been done about the correlation between working memory capacity and L2 learning,especially L2 reading comprehension or listening,while only a few focus on the correlation between working memory capacity and L2 writing or speaking.Those study results are diverse because of the differences in research subjects and methods.Thus,more empirical studies are needed in this field.This study intends to investigate the correlation between working memory capacity and second language written output in Chinese English learners.Research questions include:(1)What is the correlation between students’ working memory capacity and their English writing performance in terms of complexity,accuracy and fluency?(2)What is the difference of writing complexity,accuracy and fluency among different working memory capacity groups?(3)Is there a trade-off effect among the complexity,accuracy and fluency of the output of second language writing?If yes,then what is the trade-off effect in detail?The participants are 84 Chinese English-major freshmen from Jiangxi Normal University.65 valid data were collected at last.The research is consisted of two tasks:an online working memory capacity test through an instrument developed by Daneman & Carpenter(1980)and a writing task operated on Inputlog 5.2.1 adopted from Bergsleithner’s(2010)study.After the tasks,all valid data were input to SPSS16.0 for further analysis.The results of the study are presented in the following: no correlation between working memory capacity and lexical complexity,but a strong positive correlation between working memory capacity and syntactic complexity has been detected.A negative correlation was identified between students’ working memory capacity and their English writing accuracy.No significant correlation between working memory capacity and writing fluency has been found.In each different working memory capacity groups,the similar results have been found.Besides,a significant trade-off effect between lexical complexity and fluency is found.However,no other significant competitive influence exists between complexityand accuracy,accuracy and fluency.Accordingly,some pedagogical implications are given to teachers and students on how to improve second language performance.