B) Learner-related factors

Topic familiarity also plays a great role in reading comprehension。 Sang-Ki Lee (2007) believed that a text with a familiar topic would demand less attentional resources than that with a less familiar topic, leaving more cognitive resources available for allocation to the L2 form。 And in his study, the familiar topic groups would earn better scores in the form correction task as well as in the comprehension recall task。 So he made a conclusion that topic familiarity has in a sizable benefit in comprehension。 Anderson and Pearson (1988) put forward a schema theory which said that comprehension is composed of two parts—a linguistic component responsible for decoding text and sending information to the brain, and a conceptual component that connects this information to pre-existing knowledge structures。 Background knowledge, understood as the content area knowledge or topic familiarity learners possess regarding texts (Levi McNeil,2010)。文献综述

Working memory is also a factor of influencing reading comprehension, which also arouses an argument among linguists。 For some of them, they believed that working memory do have significant effects on reading, while others didn’t agree。 Susan E。 Gathercole et al (2016) had defined working memory as a cognitive system that supports the temporary maintenance and manipulation of information necessary for many demanding cognitive activities。 In their team’s research, they pointed out that poor working memory may contribute to problems for those children with difficulties in reading。 Leeser (2012) had studied the relation between working memory, topic familiarity and reading。 In his study, he found that “although differences in working memory capacity played some role in learners’ comprehension and processing grammatical form, significant findings for working memory emerged depending on participants’ previous knowledge about text topics。 In the meanwhile, the results also indicated that topic familiarity has consistent effects on reading。 But Einat Nevo & Zvia Breznitza (2011)’s research suggested that only a minimal ability of phonological complex memory is necessary for children to attain a normal reading level。 Julie, Clinton &Anuenue Kukona (2014) also said that it is not working memory capacity but the sensitivity to interference from similar items in memory lead to the comprehension failure。 McDougall et al (1994)’s study investigated the relationship between reading comprehension and short-term memory and found that the verbal short-term memory did not have obvious relationship with reading。