Abstract
The primary interest of the present study was to investigate the relationship between working memory capacity and reading comprehension for Japanese senior high school students of English. This relationship was a precondition for the speculation that practice in oral reading would develop students' reading comprehension skills by improving the efficiency of their working memory in the sense of Capacity Constrained Comprehension (Just & Carpenter 1992). Also examined were: (a) the effects of passage djfficulty in the reading tests on the relationship between the two constructs; and (b) the relationship between working memory capacity and errors in the reading span test, a measure of working memory capacity. The results were: (a) there was a signfIcant correlation between the students' working memory capacities and reading comprehension as measured by the appropriately-dfficult-passage reading test, (b) students with higher and lower working memory capacity had significantly better and poorer reading comprehension respectively in the more- and less-dfficult-passage reading tests, and (c) students with higher and lower working memory capacity, processing words more semantically and more phonologically respectively, made fewer and more errors respectively. Implications were also suggested concerning oral reading and working memory.
