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Introduction

1. Background of the Study
Working memory has been described as “the temporary storage of informationthat is being processed in any range of cognitive tasks" (Baddeley, 1986). From thisdefinition, it can be concluded that working memory is a cognitive system, whichundertakes both information storage and information processing in human's cognitiveactivities. Consider one simple example. When we have a conversation with anotherperson, we need to remember what our conversational person has just said at least fora short period of time when we try to make a response.Because working memory is an important system to store and process the largeamount of information in human cognitive activities such as listening, writing andreading comprehension，etc，working memory arouses great interest of scholars andscientists in the field of psycholinguistics. One significant focus in these researches ison the correlation between working memory and performance in readingcomprehension. An abundant number of researches show that it seems more difficultfor readers of low working memory capacity to process cognitive sentences especiallysyntactic complex sentence than readers of higher working memory capacity.Daneman and Carpenter (1980) designed a famous measurement to test the workingmemory capacity—Reading Span Test (RST). The reading span test taps both thestorage task and the processing task of working memory. With the help of the RST，Daneman and Carpenter (1980) found that working memory capacity is a goodpredictor for reading comprehension ability. Since the RST was invented, manyresearchers adopted and modified it in their studies on the correlation betweenworking memory capacity and the performance in reading comprehension. Cain,Oakhill, and Bryan (2004) had conducted a longitudinal study and found that workingmemory and reading strategies can predict the reading comprehension ability ofchildren at the ages of eight, nine and eleven. Lesser (2007) used a modified versionof Waters and Caplan's (1999) RST to examine the effect of working memorycapacity on (Spanish) reading comprehension. This experiment found that significantindividual differences in working memory capacity happened only when subjects arefamiliar with the topic of the text.
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2. Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study is to investigate the correlation between EFL learners'English working memory capacity and their English reading comprehension ability.This study is comprised of two experiments, one is computerized reading span testdesigned to measure subjects' English working memory capacity. The other is Englishreading comprehension test intended to examine the text reading ability of subjects.Several discussions conducted in the present study are as follows: (1) Is there anycorrelation between EFL learners' English working memory and English readingcomprehension? (2) If they are correlated with each other, which part of workingmemory has greater effect on reading comprehension ability? And which part ofreading comprehension is more greatly affected by working memory capacity? (3)What is the correlation between the storage task and processing task of workingmemory? The previous researches focused on the whole correlation between workingmemory capacity and reading comprehension ability. But in the present study, notonly the correlation between working memory capacity and reading comp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。