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摘要：However, comprehension abilities，which have been proved by abundant researches tobe associated with the process of information input and correlate with the working memorycapacity, are tested and challenged in the listening and reading sections, which account forsixty percent of the whole exam.

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background
Working memory was first put forward by Baddeley, who pointed out that workingmemory refers to the system or systems that are assumed to be indispensable so as to keepthings as well as information in mind while conducting complex tasks such as reasoning，comprehension and learning (Baddeley, 1986). Thus, working memory span is a key factorthat impacts the subject's capability to perform well in the proficiency test.Test for English Majors Grade 4 (TEM4) is a proficiency test designed to evaluate theintegrated skills of university English major students who have completed the fundamentalcompulsory courses during the first two-year study. Being a standardized test，it comprisesauditory comprehension，reading comprehension，grammar, vocabulary and writing,aiming to measure how much a foreign language a student knows (Robert，1973). Nearlyall the university students who take English language and literature as their major areobliged and required to pass this test，which is organized by the English Section of theAdvisory Committee of Foreign Languages Programs in Higher Education. It is, therefore,widely recognized in our nation and attached great importance to during the process ofEnglish teaching. And a variety of teaching methods are employed to assist the student toobtain the certificate of TEM4.However, comprehension abilities，which have been proved by abundant researches tobe associated with the process of information input and correlate with the working memorycapacity, are tested and challenged in the listening and reading sections, which account forsixty percent of the whole exam. Hence, it is hypothesized that, working memory capacity，as an important cognitive variable, will certainly produce an effect on the second languagecomprehension performance of the participants
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1.2 Purpose and Signiflcance of the Present Study
In this paper，via a comprehensive and systematic study on the theory of workingmemory and its relationship with the comprehension ability，which is tested in theproficiency test TEM4, based on a well designed software of testing working memorycapacity especially for sophomore English majors，the purpose of the following experimentis to explore whether individual performances in TEM4 interacts with working memory capacity. Then principle of this research can be applied to both English teaching andlearning in the college English classroom.As for the significance of this study, since China has the largest body of Englishlearners in the world, and English majors are a most important part, there are numerousfactors that are correlated with English learning, when it comes to psycholinguistic,memory is always a most important part of English learning. As a new rising branch ofmemory, working memory has a more complex functioning system, it is a cognitive systemwhich provides temporarily storing and processing information for all kinds of complextasks such as reasoning, problem solving, and language comprehension, etc. It plays acritical role in storing the intermediate and final products of a reader's or listener'scomputations as she or he constructs and integrates ideas from the stream of successivewords in a text or spoken discourse. As for the correlation between working memory andEnglish proficiency, there are more academic guesses than practical experiments in本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。