Text Difficulty, Working Memory Capacity and Mind Wandering During Chinese EFL Learners’ Reading
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Xianli Gao
Xianli GAO is currently an associate professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University. His research focuses on second language acquisition, English language teaching and learning, and L2 teacher professional development.
Li LI (the corresponding author) is currently an associate professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University. Her research interests include English language teaching, public speaking, and teacher education.
Abstract
This experimental study investigated how text difficulty and different working memory capacity (WMC) affected Chinese EFL learners’ reading comprehension and their tendency to engage in task-unrelated thoughts, that is, mind wandering (MW), in the course of reading. Sixty first-year university non-English majors participated in the study. A two-factor mixed experimental design of 2 (text difficulty: difficult and simple) × 2 (WMC: high/large and low/small) was employed. Results revealed that 1) the main and interaction effects of WMC and text difficulty on voluntary MW were significant, whereas those on involuntary MW were not; 2) while reading the easy texts, the involuntary MW of high-WMC individuals was less frequent than that of low-WMC ones, whereas while reading the difficult ones, the direct relationship between WMC and involuntary MW was not found; and that 3) high-WMC individuals had a lower overall rate of MW and better reading performance than low-WMC individuals did, but with increasing text difficulty, their rates of overall MW and voluntary MW were getting higher and higher, and the reading performance was getting lower and lower. These results lend support to WM theory and have pedagogical implications for the instruction of L2 reading.
About the authors
Xianli GAO is currently an associate professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University. His research focuses on second language acquisition, English language teaching and learning, and L2 teacher professional development.
Li LI (the corresponding author) is currently an associate professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University. Her research interests include English language teaching, public speaking, and teacher education.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Guangdong Provincial Undergraduate Teaching Reform and Quality Engineering Construction Project (Grant No. GDJG2021295); Foreign Language Special Project of Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (Grant No. GD24WZXC01-07); Educational Science Planning Project of Department of Education of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2021GXJK315); The 1st Batch of Industry-University Cooperative Education Projects in 2022 by the Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 220501339245050).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Second Language Acquisition
- A Comparative Study of the L2 Pragmatic Competence of University Students in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland: The Contributions of Sociocultural Context and Linguistic Proficiency
- Effects of Collocational Congruency, Frequency and L2 Proficiency on the Processing of English Adjective-Noun Collocations
- Embodied Meaning in Comprehending Abstract Chinese Counterfactuals
- Text Difficulty, Working Memory Capacity and Mind Wandering During Chinese EFL Learners’ Reading
- Testing, Evaluation and Assessment
- Scoring and Consequential Validity Evidence of Computer- and Paper-Based Writing Tests in Times of Change
- Cross-Cultural Communication
- A Cognitive Study on Politeness Intention Processing and Its Association with Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication
- English-Medium Instruction
- Lecturers’ Efforts in Building Rapport in the English-Medium Instruction (EMI) Context: Focus on the Use of Communication Strategies
- Book Review
- Review of Accessing Academic Discourse: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory
- Systematizing Teacher Development: A Review of Foreign Language Teacher Learning
- Abstracts
- Chinese Abstracts
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Second Language Acquisition
- A Comparative Study of the L2 Pragmatic Competence of University Students in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland: The Contributions of Sociocultural Context and Linguistic Proficiency
- Effects of Collocational Congruency, Frequency and L2 Proficiency on the Processing of English Adjective-Noun Collocations
- Embodied Meaning in Comprehending Abstract Chinese Counterfactuals
- Text Difficulty, Working Memory Capacity and Mind Wandering During Chinese EFL Learners’ Reading
- Testing, Evaluation and Assessment
- Scoring and Consequential Validity Evidence of Computer- and Paper-Based Writing Tests in Times of Change
- Cross-Cultural Communication
- A Cognitive Study on Politeness Intention Processing and Its Association with Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication
- English-Medium Instruction
- Lecturers’ Efforts in Building Rapport in the English-Medium Instruction (EMI) Context: Focus on the Use of Communication Strategies
- Book Review
- Review of Accessing Academic Discourse: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory
- Systematizing Teacher Development: A Review of Foreign Language Teacher Learning
- Abstracts
- Chinese Abstracts
