Text Difficulty, Working Memory Capacity and Mind Wandering During Chinese EFL Learners’ Reading

Abstract This experimental study investigated how text difficulty and different working memory capacity (WMC) affected Chinese EFL learners’ reading comprehension and their tendency to engage in task-unrelated thoughts, that is, mind wandering (MW), in the course of reading. Sixty first-year university non-English majors participated in the study. A two-factor mixed experimental design of 2 (text difficulty: difficult and simple) × 2 (WMC: high/large and low/small) was employed. Results revealed that 1) the main and interaction effects of WMC and text difficulty on voluntary MW were significant, whereas those on involuntary MW were not; 2) while reading the easy texts, the involuntary MW of high-WMC individuals was less frequent than that of low-WMC ones, whereas while reading the difficult ones, the direct relationship between WMC and involuntary MW was not found; and that 3) high-WMC individuals had a lower overall rate of MW and better reading performance than low-WMC individuals did, but with increasing text difficulty, their rates of overall MW and voluntary MW were getting higher and higher, and the reading performance was getting lower and lower. These results lend support to WM theory and have pedagogical implications for the instruction of L2 reading.