Investigating the Relationship between Working Memory Capacity, Anxiety, andIranian Intermediate EFL Learners' Speaking Fluency

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between working memory capacity, anxiety, andIranian intermediate EFL learners' speaking fluency. The data were collected from 60 female EFL learnersstudying English at a language institute in Tehran. First, an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administrated toensure the homogeneity of the participants and based on the results of the test thirty homogenous learners wereselected as the main participants of the study. Next, a working memory capacity test developed by Daneman andCarpenter (1980) was administered to the participants. Later, the researcher administered a speaking test on atopic appropriate to the level of the participants which was taken from Top Notch 1 (Saslow & Ascher, 2011).Then, the researcher recorded their voices and transcribed them in order to calculate the number of lexical wordsthe students could articulate based on a formula developed by Gilmore (2004). For calculating anxiety, ForeignLanguage Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, 2001) was applied. Then, the Pearson correlation formula wasutilized to analyze the obtained data. The results revealed a significant correlation between working memorycapacity and speaking fluency. And finally, significant correlation was depicted between anxiety and speakingfluency.

Investigating the Relationship between Working Memory Capacity, Anxiety, andIranian Intermediate EFL Learners' Speaking Fluency Keywords:

anxiety” , “speaking fluency” , “working memory