Investigating the Relationship Between ELT Students’ Verbal Working Memory Capacity, Reasoning Ability, and Foreign Language Proficiency of Productive Skills

Abstract

The role of working memory and reasoning ability in foreign language proficiency has already been well-established. As another contribution to the building block of the relevant research, the current study aimed to investigate any possible relationships between English Language Teaching (ELT) students’ verbal working memory capacity, grammatical reasoning ability, and their proficiency in productive skills in English. 40 ELT students, 20 of whom were in the first-year while the other 20 were in the fourth year, voluntarily participated in the research. They were asked to take two tests on the website of Cambridge Brain Sciences; the Digit Span Test to measure their verbal working memory capacity and the Grammatical Reasoning Test to measure their reasoning ability. They were also tested on their speaking and writing skills in English through TOEFL-IBT test items. The scores on language tests were compared with the scores on the Digit Span and the Grammatical Reasoning Tests by running multiple regression analysis and a full-factorial ANOVA. Results revealed that while the writing ability had a relationship with the verbal working memory and reasoning ability, the speaking ability could not be predicted by them. Moreover, it was also yielded that the grade level of the students did not have any effects on the L2 productive skills.

Keywords

• verbal working memory
• reasoning ability
• L2 productive skills
• digit span

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