Effects of Working Memory and Topic Familiarity on EFL Learners’ Oral Production

This study examined the effects of working memory and topic familiarity on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ oral performance from psycholinguistic perspective. Sixty-one sophomores majoring in English from a university in China were divided into high and low working memory capacity groups to perform two oral tasks of familiar and unfamiliar topics. The results demonstrated that working memory exerted significant effect on accuracy, fluency and overall grade, but no significant effect on syntactic or lexical complexity was found. Topic familiarity significantly affected lexical complexity, accuracy, fluency and overall grade, but syntactic complexity remained unaffected. Moreover, working memory and topic familiarity had significant interaction effects on fluency. Participants with high working memory capacity achieved the best fluency in tasks of familiar topic. The findings can be explained from Levelt’s model of speech production and Skehan’s limited attention capacity hypothesis. The findings also reveal that working memory is a central cognitive resource in second language speaking. The study concludes with implications for task selection and design in EFL teaching and assessment.