The role of reading span in factual and inferential comprehension and retention in L2 reading

The present study attempts to explain the relationship of working memory (WM) to L2 reading comprehension (RC) by conducting two experiments. The participants’ WM was measured by two reading span (RS) tests adapted from Daneman and Carpenter (1980). Specifically, Experiment 1 explores the role of L1-RS and L2-RS in overall RC in L2. Fifty-eight Korean undergraduate students participated in this experiment. The results showed that L2-RS had better predictive power than L1-RS for L2 RC performance and that the participants performed better in the L1-RS than L2-RS test. Experiment 2 further investigates the role of RS in terms of types of comprehension and retention. For this, fifty Korean students were divided into two groups according to their L2-RS. The RC tests were given in two types of questions: factual and inferential. The retention of information was assessed by two memory tests: immediate and delayed tests. The results revealed that the high-RS group consistently outperformed the low-RS group on the two types of RC questions in the two memory tests. No significant decay, however, was found between the memory tests. In addition, there was no interaction between group, question type, and time. The findings showed that RS does play a significant role in L2 RC performance.